Money Laundering and Cryptocurrency: What’s the Antidote?

Some call it a mega Ponzi scheme and some call it a speculative bubble. Nevertheless if anything ever has caught the attention of the regulators, investors and tech wizards, post the advent of internet, it is definitely the cryptocurrencies and their underlying distributed ledger technology (DLT) commonly known as Blockchain. Despite many promising features, cryptocurrency has been an easy avenue for Money Laundering (ML). Consider Liberty Reserve, which willfully facilitated ML activities worth $8 billion or consider Silk Road, which was designed to be an anonymous marketplace in the dark web contributing 4 percent to 9 percent of all Bitcoin activities. This article dives into current cryptocurrency regulations around ML, identifies the weak links and recommends on how we can embrace technology and regulation to fight ML.  

Two major ML regulations:

1. European Union’s (EU’s) 4th and 5th Anti Money Laundering (AML) Directive: