BitBay announces it will delist privacy coin Monero

BitBay, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Estonia, announced yesterday that it would delist Monero on Feb. 19, 2020. The exchange will cease deposits of XMR this upcoming Friday, Nov. 29th. Besides a week long period between November 29th and Dec. 5th, where withdrawals will be temporarily blocked, users will have until May 20, 2020 to withdraw any remaining XMR. The exchange stated that Monero is being delisted due to its privacy features, and that “the decision was made to block the possibility of money laundering and inflow from external networks.” BitBay is a licensed exchange and must comply with market standards and regulations in order to maintain its relationships with banks and payment operators.

Why it matters:

• The announcement is the latest in the trend of exchange delistings for privacy coins. Coinbase delisted Zcash from its UK markets in August. In 2018, Japanese regulators banned all cryptocurrencies providing anonymity features to users leading to privacy coins being delisted from Japanese exchanges.
• Privacy may be the ultimate fault line between cryptocurrency and the existing financial system. Anonymity creates anxiety for regulators who may be fundamentally opposed to absolute privacy, while anonymity is also fundamental to fulfilling the vision of censorship-resistant private money. This will be an important trend to follow especially as Bitcoin, the spearhead of the industry slowly makes the push towards increased privacy. There’s some who’ve even speculated that the issue of privacy is so polarizing it could be the source of the next contentious Bitcoin hard fork.