Kraken to delist Monero in Belgium, Ireland
Due to EU anti-money laundering rules, Kraken will delist privacy cryptocurrency Monero in Belgium and Ireland by June 10.
Kraken announced it will suspend Monero (XMR) deposits and trading on May 10. The withdrawals would remain open until June 10, but customers were advised to close all margin and leveraged positions before XMR trading is suspended.
XMR hardly reacted to the news, as the token’s price only shifted 0.6% in the last 24 hours and traded flat at around $133, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Kraken will disable withdrawals from June 10 and convert all Monero balances to Bitcoin (BTC). The move in Belgium and Ireland comes after the crypto exchange removed the privacy coins from its global exchange in February.
In January, the firm assigned a monitoring tag to several coins, such as XMR. Other crypto exchanges, including Binance and OKX, also delisted Monero.
Kraken’s Monero support cracks under EU regulations
Kraken’s decision to cease XMR support in Belgium and Ireland comes on the backdrop of anti-money laundering (AML) policies introduced by the European Union last month. The crypto community initially surmised that the EU moved to ban self-custodial wallets and crypto transactions.
However, Circle’s EU Strategy and Policy Director Patrick Hansen explained that the new AML regulations prohibit crypto-asset service providers from offering privacy coins and users from making merchant payments with tokens like XMR.
Similarly, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) legislation also regards privacy coins as contraband. MiCA became law last June and will be enforceable by December, while the EU’s new AML regulations will likely become applicable by mid-2027.
