Blockchain, thanks to its transparency, provides authorities with a qualitatively new way to fight organized crime in the financial sphere, Europol officials said.
The discussion took place as part of the Sixth Global Conference on Criminal Finance and Cryptocurrencies, held last week in The Hague. Participants included European regulators, law enforcement agencies, representatives from the Binance exchange and analytics firms Chainalysis, CypherTrace and TRM Labs.
They agreed that the spread of cryptocurrencies is contributing to the emergence of new forms of crime. Criminals use digital assets in drug trafficking, match-fixing, financing production and procurement of weapons of mass destruction, as well as for money laundering.
“Nevertheless, the blockchain technology’s ability to trace transactions simplifies the search for and recovery of stolen funds,” the experts said.
Europol expects that the EU authorities’ agreed new bill regulating cryptocurrencies MiCA, will tighten control over the market for alternative finance.
The rules, among other things, will require crypto exchanges to collect and store information identifying transaction participants, and to hand over these data to authorities upon request.
At the same time, the European Parliament has decided to refrain from tracking private wallets not hosted on custodial services.
Overall, legally treating cryptocurrencies as traditional assets would significantly ease seizure, custody, and conversion of coins into fiat, Europol added.
Earlier the IMF urged “catch up” in regulating digital assets.
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