Exchanges delisting Monero are doing it ‘out of ignorance’

While the perception of cryptocurrencies has changed for the better since the crackdown of Silk Road, the outlook on privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies has not seen much change. Governments continue to tread cautiously towards them compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The wariness has impacted the growth of fungible cryptocurrencies such as Monero as more and more centralized exchanges have started to delist such coins from their platforms. The latest such move was reported from Bitbay, with the cryptocurrency exchange delisting Monero, citing concerns of money laundering due to its privacy features. Prior to this, OKEx had announced that it would delist privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies, including Monero, Dash, and ZCash in September.

This was one of the topics discussed during the latest session of Monero Talk. The host of the show, Douglas Tuman asked whether exchanges delisting the cryptocurrency was because of privacy reasons or whether it was related to other reasons such as its frequent upgrades. To this, Justin Ehrenhofer, a regulatory compliance analyst at DV Trading, stated that that the upgrades required “were quite minor” compared to all the other tasks they do.

According to him, the issue was “mostly a compliance perception,” further stating that exchanges are concerned about being on the “right side of compliance.” He went on to state,

“So, Monero is sort of the main target. So, we’re just going to ignore that for now and that might still be the case. I would call a perception issue in the industry, rather than a significant clear rule-based compliance issue.”

Subsequently, Howard Chu, CTO of Symas Corp, pointed that while one or two exchanges are dropping the cryptocurrency, meanwhile there four or five other exchanges listing it. Chu said,

“I think the exchanges that are dropping it are dropping it out of ignorance. So, using their judgment as a yardstick doesn’t really give you much.”

Further, Jethro Grassie also highlighted that the success of Monero, in fact, did not lie in the hands of whether governments accept the cryptocurrency or not, but relied on whether it’s useful for people. He said,

“Like, take a step back for a moment. The success of Monero isn’t bound by whether the governments accept or don’t accept Monero. The success of Monero is if it’s useful for people, if people can use it and if that means that they exchange it by decentralized exchanges or exchange it on the big exchanges like the Binance’s of the world.”