Members of the European Parliament said on Monday that NFT trading platforms should be included in European Union’s anti-money laundering (AML) laws.
Socialist representatives and lawmakers from the Green Party also endorsed the idea of including private crypto wallets and DeFi under a proposed regulation on money laundering. New laws designed to license crypto companies, known as the Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCA) were provincially agreed upon by the bloc, last week.
Mica imposes identity checks on transactions for the receiving end. The European Commission does not want sectors such as banking to be included in the detailed money-laundering procedures – which it considers only for the crypto sector.
Kira Marie Peter-Hansen and Ernest Urtasun of the Green Party have tagged along with socialists Csaba Molnár and Aurore Lalucq to make NFT platforms “obliged entities” under EU money laundering law. Even OpenSea will have to assess the risk of illicit finance happening right under their noses.
However, Gunnar Beck of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party wants to protect the crypto sector from such heinous laws, saying they “make it possible for people to diversify their portfolio and protect themselves from risks of [European Central Bank]-induced euro inflation.”
Dutch lawmaker Paul Tang, Peter-Hansen, Lalucq and Urtasun made proposed further amendments to impose laundering checks on “unhosted wallets” that aren’t managed by any regulated crypto provider and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). All these politicians are trying to target the crypto sector via MiCA and a similar set of laws called the Transfer of Funds regulation. The Transfer of Funds regulation was abandoned after opposition from EU member governments.