According to Christopher DePow, senior advisor for financial institution regulation and compliance at London-based blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, most crypto activity is already taking place on such regulated platforms, making it an effective way to circumvent the authorizations set out in the Emergencies Act. large transactions. He pointed out that regulated platforms and payment businesses are not the only means of trading crypto.
“What is more challenging is preventing transactions from happening in a peer-to-peer manner,” DePow said. It would be a challenge to track them as two individuals are sending money between people controlled by someone outside a financial intermediary without a hosted wallet, he said. “You can monitor it; You can look for information indicating that that type of activity is taking place. But actually stopping it… is a big challenge.”
The founder and CEO of crypto exchange NDX, Bilal Hammoud, is skeptical that the federal government has a complete understanding of how crypto transactions work. He told the Financial Post that when it comes to cryptocurrencies, there are three wallets: bitcoin as a decentralized protocol, crypto companies registered with Fintrack, and unregistered platforms, such as international services and payment providers.
“For the first, for an underlying network like bitcoin, it is certainly out of reach of the government. It is a very decentralized network,” said Hammood, referring to the regulated entities that are already reporting to Fintrack. , the emergency act would not be much different from the regular day-to-day activities of locating some target activity.
Once a cryptocurrency used in support of a vaccine mandate protest is exposed to one of these regulated crypto exchanges that comply with KYC rules, the user can be identified and transactions linked to them.
