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Speaking to Bloomberg, the EU Commission Vice-President Valois Dombrovskis said Brussels was concerned about the risks surrounding bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exchanges and called on member states to transpose of the new European directive which seeks to include cryptocurrency exchanges in the bloc’s anti-money laundering legal framework. Mr Dombrovskis admitted the EU Commission did not consider the cryptocurrency phenomena to be a risk to the financial stability of the bloc, but that concerns about consumers protection were enough to spark some fears. He said: “Last week we had a roundtable on cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings to discuss what is the potential EU response to this phenomenon and some of the things which are emerging from it.

BLOOMBERG•GETTY Bitcoin news: EU calls on all member states to impose new cryptocurrency regulations

We call on all EU member states to transpose this directive as soon as possible Valois Dombrovskis

“First, we do not see it now as a system risk to the financial stability, not least because trading volumes in Europe are relatively small. “Europe is less than 5 per cent of the total cryptocurrency trading. “But we see concerns for investors or consumers protection, so there we have asked the European Supervisory Authority to update a warning which they put out a couple of weeks ago, clearly telling to potential investors that there is nothing actually backing cryptocurrencies, it’s basically demand and supply.

“And there are substantial risks of losing your investment. “A second concern regards anti-money laundering, so there we already have a proposal to include cryptocurrency exchanges in the scope of our anti-money laundering framework. “Now that this agreement has been reached we call on all EU member states to transpose this directive as soon as possible so that those provisions enter into force.” Bitcoin price dropped below $8,000 on Sunday joining all other major coins into the red.

Cryptocurrency price: A year in charts Mon, March 12, 2018 Compare crypto currencies (Ripple, Bitcoin, Ethereum, LiteCoin) on value, market cap and supply for the past year Play slideshow coindesk.com 1 of 10 LiteCoin is going down with the market dip