This week has been rather loud with crypto regulations, financial bodies all around the Asian regions have been tightening their laws in relation to these new technologies. While the industry as a whole made enormous progress during the bear market, with ICE’s Bakkt just around the corner, there are still on-going questions related to this new field that need solving.

Taiwan incorporated Cryptocurrency transactions into AML legislation

Taiwan has been known to be a technology-friendly region within Asia and pro-crypto congressman Jason Hsu has now came forward with additional regulations to make crypto act similar to cash in-front of the authorities. The naw laws offer a new and solid framework for how the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) and crypto-related businesses handle the flow of money and the customers.

Now the FSC will gain the ability to conduct their own vetting and monitoring strategies during the inspection of exchanges. Prior to this exchanges only needed an alias from users, but after this users will require to conduct trading under their real name.

This mostly affects crypto-to-crypto exchanges and transactions as fiat-to-crypto exchanges have always demanded identification documents from users.

China’s central bank criticizes airdrops in regards to existing ICO regulations

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has recently published a document detailing that airdrops are now considered on the same level as Initial Coin Offerings.

The report warns that the recently very popular crypto airdrops are very similar to ICOs in the sense that these are a new method to go get around local regulations. First free assets are issued and afterwards these assets are used to freely speculate on the market.

The rest of the document focuses on the avoidance to comply under local regulations with the help of foreign agents and investing through them into different crypto related projects.

Japan’s FSA plans to put a cap on crypto margin trading leverage

Japan is planning to limit the available margin trading leverage in order to cut down on speculation according to Nikkei.

Even though this is still in consideration, but some exchanges already voluntarily cap leverage at 25 times the deposits. Meanwhile experts proposed the limiting of caps between 2 and 4 times of the trading amounts.

The concern was raised because cryptocurrencies and especially margin trading are extremely popular in Japan. Altogether $613 billion worth of cryptocurrency was traded in Japan during 2017 and 80% of it was done through exchanges that allow margin trading. Regulators are fearing that costumers of these exchanges could lose their savings as a result of fast market cycles and high volatility.