The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said Thursday it will reopen its proposed rulemaking period for an extra fifteen days for its crypto wallet reporting requirements, and another forty five days for a necessity on recordkeeping and counterparty reporting requirements.
First submitted Dec. 18, 2020, the proposals will require crypto exchanges to store name and address info for customers transferring more than $3,000 in cryptocurrency each day to private crypto wallets, and file currency transaction reports (CTRs) for customers transacting in more than $10,000 each day.
Critics of the rule said it will be technically out of the question for a few projects to comply because smart contracts and author decentralized tools don’t have name or perhaps address info to provide.
Maybe most important, the extension means Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who’s believed to be spearheading this effort, is going to be out of office by the time the comments period closes, perhaps allowing for FinCEN to better incorporate crypto industry feedback.
In the public notice, FinCEN wrote that the proposed CTR requirements “are essentially equivalent to the existing CTR reporting requirements that apply to transactions in currency,” and called the proposal “vital” to closing loopholes that terrorists or perhaps other malicious actors might use. This’s the part which is going to see a 15 day extension for comments.
FinCEN was less effusive about the recordkeeping and counterparty details, only writing, “FinCEN is actually providing a longer period in light of the relatively greater complexity of those elements of the proposed different issues and rule identified in comments received during the first comment period.”
This was the part that raised the most controversy from the blockchain industry , receiving more than 7,000 comments, with the vast majority of responders criticizing the pace or the rule by which it was being pushed through.
In a statement, the Chamber of Digital Commerce said if the proposed rule was implemented as is, “a series of unintended consequences that raise serious privacy concerns will have resulted from this rushed rulemaking process.”
The extension does not mean the rule won’t be implemented; it is still entirely possible that FinCEN is going to choose to run with the rule after the last version is actually published.
The clock for the comment period restarted when the document was posted in the Federal Register, the nation’s logbook, which was done yesterday, Friday, January 15.
