Report: More than 50 countries have imposed restrictions on cryptocurrencies

In total, 51 countries worldwide have, to some degree, imposed bans on cryptocurrencies. This follows from the report of the Global Legal Research Directorate (GLRD) of the Library of Congress.

The GLRD noted that since the first publication of the report, the number of such jurisdictions has grown considerably.

“While the 2018 report identified eight jurisdictions with an outright ban and 15 with an implicit ban, the November 2021 update already lists nine and 42 jurisdictions, respectively,” the document says.

The first category includes Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Nepal, Qatar, Tunisia and China.

Jurisdictions in the implicit ban category are those that imposed various restrictions. For example, banks or businesses were prohibited from conducting operations with digital assets or offering related services, and obstacles were put in place to the operation of exchanges in the country.

Included in this group were Kazakhstan, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and a large portion of African states.

Experts from the organisation reviewed the regulatory status of cryptocurrencies by country. They highlighted the application of tax rules to assets, as well as anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CFT) measures.

Both aspects are accounted for in the laws of 103 jurisdictions. Among them are all European Union countries, except Bulgaria — which has no tax rules for digital assets.

GLRD researchers found the absence of AML/CFT norms in countries such as South Africa, Brazil, Chile and Georgia. The latter is one of the mining hubs. At the same time in Kazakhstan, cryptocurrency regulation is entirely absent, although the country accounts for the second-largest share of Bitcoin hashrate.

As the Chinese authorities launched a new wave of crackdowns against mining and cryptocurrencies, the United States emerged as the leader in terms of the share of total computing power devoted to mining digital gold.

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