An Israeli District Court recently ruled that Israeli banks are not obligated to provide financial services to companies whose primary business is trading in cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum
An Israeli District Court recently ruled that Israeli banks are not obligated to provide financial services to companies whose primary business is trading in cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The Court reasoned that banks should not have to assume the risks associated with providing a financial platform to these digital currency businesses when the leading Israeli authorities on the subject, namely the Central Bank, the Securities Authority, and the Anti-Money Laundering and Terror Financing Authority, themselves have been struggling to delineate clear measures to minimize them.
One of the primary risks Israeli authorities and other regulators around the globe noted is the pseudo-anonymous nature of cryptocurrency holdings. Regulators view the digital token transfer method as a “black box”, low in accountability and virtually impossible to subject to existing anti-money laundering (AML) and anti-terror financing regulations. However, built-in features of cryptocurrencies, specifically their underlying blockchain technology, have the potential to improve, not harm, AML efforts, even surpassing mechanisms already in place today.
Source/More: How blockchain could end, instead of enable, money laundering | VentureBeat
