United States Treasury Under Secretary of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Sigal Mandelker (quite the title) has had her say on Facebook’s Libra. She has been quoted as saying that Facebook must comply with anti money laundering standards.
“Whether it’s bitcoin, Ethereum, Libra, our message is the same to all of these companies: anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism has to be built into your design from the get-go,” Mandelker said.
The comments were made after her meeting with Swiss government officials and representatives from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other international financial bodies to discuss cryptocurrencies including the planned Libra project, which is to be launched by a Swiss-based association.
“While the digital currency industry has paid tremendous attention to developing the underlying technology, much of the industry has paid far too little attention to ensuring that the networks they are building do not enable terrorists and other bad actors to hide and move money” Mandelker added.
Mandelker went on the say “Switzerland, like a number of other countries, has promoted itself as a hub for fintech and for innovation, and so of course any country that promotes itself in that way “” in my view, it’s incumbent upon that country to take these particular concerns at the highest level in(to) the utmost regard,”
Now we must wait for Facebook to address these concerns. It has been said that they do have a plan with AML and KYC regulation but no concrete details have been released as of yet.
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