Nine congresspeople have signed on to a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, telling him to hold his horses. The Thursday letter is in response to the Treasury's recent proposal to make registered crypto businesses hold on to more customer information, especially when transacting with self-hosted wallets. The proposal has been met with widespread outrage from the crypto community. Among grievances, many cite the fact that Mnuchin is pushing this rule out just weeks before the administration of Joe Biden comes into power, and with it his likely replacement, Janet Yellen. Accompanying new proposals for rules are invitations for public …

The U.S. Treasury has settled with BitGo over charges that it facilitated users in sanctioned areas to transact using its crypto wallet services between 2015 and 2019. BitGo, an institutional crypto custodian service and wallet operator, did not do due diligence in blocking wallet users based in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, said the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Controls in a Dec. 30 announcement. OFAC said of BitGo: "BitGo failed to exercise due caution or care for its sanctions compliance obligations when it failed to prevent persons apparently located in sanctioned jurisdictions to open accounts and send digital …

With the two-week commentary period winding down, Jerry Brito, executive director of non-profit crypto policy advocate group Coin Center, says comments could make a difference in the ultimate outcome of the self-custodied wallet ruling recently proposed by the U.S. Treasury. “Coin Center is working with folks in Congress to get some letters sent to Secretary Mnuchin requesting an extension to the rushed comment period,” Brito said in a Dec. 28 tweet, adding: “Everyone in the cryptocurrency ecosystem should file a comment with FinCEN explaining how this rule would affect them and pointing out the unintended consequences. Filing a comment really …

A group of leading U.S. financial regulators has released a new statement on stablecoins. One of the headlining topics of crypto regulation news this year, stablecoins were the main topic of a Dec. 23 statement the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, or PWG. The PWG includes representation from the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The group's stated opinions were hardly revolutionary, mostly saying that stablecoin issuers would need to abide by all the typical rules of the road in terms of financial law. The regulators say that stablecoins need …

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently dropped a proposal requiring exchanges and crypto platforms to verify the identity of customers exporting digital assets to self-hosted wallets. Crypto exchange OKCoin noted the proposal would create additional work for exchanges. “Upon preliminary review of the FinCen [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] proposal as well as the wallet verification requirements, I think the proposal of extending the CTR requirement to crypto exchanges and having to collect the physical address of the recipient would mean great operational and administrative burden for exchanges,” OKCoin’s chief compliance officer, Megan Monroe-Coleman, told Cointelegraph. Rumors of potential new crypto …

This week various media reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was considering whether or not legislation governing self-custodied wallets should be implemented. This led some analysts and crypto pundits to speculate whether or not this would impact Bitcoin, and the current bullish momentum that has been driving crypto prices higher. The threat of new crypto sector-focused regulations is a credible event which has negatively impacted crypto prices in the past, but this time around there are a fewreasons why the proposed rule probably will not lead to a Bitcoin price crash. The possibility of regulation is priced into the …

As per recent rumors, United States Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, could drop a stringent piece of crypto-related legislation before his expected exit at 2020’s end. The ruling could potentially severely limit or ban self-custodied digital asset wallets — a key component of the entire industry. Cynthia Lummis, a U.S. Senator-elect hailing from the crypto-friendly state of Wyoming, finds the ruling harmful. “I spoke with Secretary Mnuchin last week and strongly pressed him for a better path forward,” Lummis said as part of a tweet thread on Friday, adding: “Congress is best placed to weigh the competing policy issues …

The latter half of 2020 has seen record Bitcoin (BTC) prices and a number of key regulatory developments, such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s, or OCC’s, approval of crypto custody at national banks. Legal policy for the digital asset industry currently faces an uncertain future, however, as a number of government roles are set to change heading into 2020, according to former Coinbase exec and current acting leader of the OCC, Brain Brooks. “I can’t speak to the specific price movement, but I’ll tell you what I’m worried about,” Brooks told CNBC in a Friday interview, …

The crypto community has a saying: “Not your keys, not your coins,” which means that if you hold your crypto on a third-party custodial wallet, you don’t truly have ownership of the coins. The entity controlling the private key of the wallet ultimately has power over it. Self-hosted wallets, or non-custodial wallets, allow individuals to receive, send and store their own cryptocurrency without the need of a custodial entity. As life has become increasingly more digitized, the use of cash for transactions and as a store of value has declined considerably. For those in our economy with access to digital …

In a tweet Monday evening, President Trump announced the departure of William Barr from the office of Attorney General. The announcement comes the same day that the Electoral College convened and confirmed Joe Biden's victory in the November election. Barr, long one of Trump's most loyal allies, will be stepping down on December 23. Under Barr's leadership, the Department of Justice has ramped up its actions in crypto, including high-profile criminal charges against BitMEX's leadership and the release of a new framework for crypto enforcement in October. The latter half of this year has also seen the largest seizures of …

An unprecedented year, 2020 has sent the global economy into a tailspin in an effort to compensate for COVID-19-related difficulties. If the traditional system collapses, Bitcoin will become vital, according to United States Senator-elect Cynthia Lummis. "If we reach the point where we have overspent so much that things start crashing down, the black swan event occurs with regard to any fiat currency — whether it’s ours or yours or China’s or Japan’s — that there is a backstop available to every government in the world, and that backstop is Bitcoin,” Lummis told Peter McCormack during a recent episode of …

Crypto players were quick to respond to the news that hackers breached the U.S. Treasury Department. According to a report from Reuters, a “sophisticated hacking group” backed by a foreign government — reportedly Russia, according to three people familiar with the investigation — was able to breach the U.S. Treasury Department as well as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, with the Department of Commerce. The incident happened less than a month after Donald Trump fired Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs. However, Reuters stated that the hackers had been monitoring NTIA staff emails run on …