Australian Securities Watchdog Prepares to Mitigate Potential Harm of Cryptocurrencies and ICOs

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The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), as the nation’s chief securities regulator, has recently released its corporate plan 2018-2022 to focus on monitoring the potential dangers from emerging technologies and services such as cryptocurrencies and ICOs.

Future Plans
The ASIC will be launching a project to examine and study the usage and popularity of cryptocurrencies across various industries. In addition, regarding cryptocurrency exchanges, the regulator said it was preparing a policy that would bring them under the same level of scrutiny that traditional stock exchanges and financial market operators are also subject to, by “applying the principles for regulating market infrastructure providers to crypto exchanges.”

Presently, domestic cryptocurrency exchanges fall under the regulation of the country’s financial intelligence agency and watchdog, the Australian Transactions and Reporting Analysis Center (AUSTRAC).

These regulations have been in effect since April 2018. However, AUSTRAC has been monitoring domestic cryptocurrency exchanges since December 2017. Exchange operators were obligated to enroll with AUSTRAC’s ‘Digital Currency Exchange Register’ whilst complying with anti-money laundering (AML), counter-terrorism financing (CTF) and know-your-customer (KYC) rules.


https://bitcoinnews.com/australian-secu ... icos-harm/