Renowned crypto exchange Kraken has announced plans to delist privacy token Monero for its Belgium and Ireland users. According to the post, the exchange clarified that it was winding down its support for the tokens for users in the countries from May 10. Furthermore, the exchange urged traders with open margin trading positions to close them before the deadline or the exchange would do it automatically.
Kraken set to delist Monero in Belgium and Ireland
The post mentioned Kraken has plans to finally delist the token on June 10. This means that users need to have swapped their Monero for other tokens as the platform will not support its withdrawals on the said date. The exchange clarified that users who fail to do all this will have the Monero in their account swapped to Bitcoin.
This news is coming after a recent update by the European Union about anonymous accounts and privacy tokens. The union released a statement barring exchanges from offering users anonymous accounts and supporting privacy tokens like Monero. With exchanges complying with the directive, it has rarely affected the price of the token.
According to CoinGecko data, the token is currently trading around $133.32, slightly up for the week by 2.8%, with a 24-hour high of 0.4%.
However, the token rarely reacted to the news of Binance’s delisting on February 6, registering a slight decline to 136 from its previous price of $165. The price of the token experienced a further decline the following day but soon recovered after that.
Regulatory crackdown on privacy tokens
Regulatory agencies across the world have been having it out for privacy tokens for a while now. Japan was the first country to announce a ban on such privacy tokens in 2018. South Korea followed suit in 2020, banning exchanges from listing them. Australia also announced a regulatory crackdown on privacy-focused tokens.
In 2023, Dubai announced a ban on privacy tokens and all crypto trading activities related to them. Aside from Binance and Kraken, other crypto exchanges have also moved to comply with regulatory orders to delist the tokens from their platforms. OKX is one of the exchanges that recently announced a ban on the tokens.
