As regulators grow increasingly concerned about investors moving their cryptocurrency out of centralized exchanges, one industry exec has assessed the probability of a potential ban of noncustodial wallets. Stepan Uherik, the chief financial officer of SatoshiLabs, the firm behind the Trezor hardware wallet, is confident that it’s highly unlikely that governments around the world could one day ban the use of noncustodial wallets. “It’s very improbable that all the countries would ban noncustodial wallets, or any other aspect of Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network for that matter,” the chief financial officer told Cointelegraph. Uherik said that potential efforts to ban noncustodial wallets …

It’s no secret that China has a clear disdain for all things crypto, as was highlighted last year when the country decided to ban its digital asset industry in its entirety. That said, one niche related to the crypto industry that has continued to thrive in the region despite the ban is its nonfungible token (NFT) market. However, with certain negative developments coming to the forefront recently, this may not be the case much longer. In this regard, many local social media platforms and internet firms have continued to update their policies so as to restrict and, in some cases, …

The Central Bank of Sudan (CBOS) cautioned the country’s citizens against dealing with “all types of cryptocurrencies” due to “the high risks” that they pose. This announcement came as a reaction to the increasing interest in digital assets among the country’s population, which has been facing three-digit inflation rates since the 2021 military coup. On March 27, the Sudan News Agency (SUNA) published a short announcement from the CBOS declaring that due to high risks, which include “financial crimes, electronic piracy and the risk of losing their value,” citizens are not advised to use cryptocurrencies of any sort. The CBOS …

In an ongoing effort to carve out a regulated crypto market for the general public, the Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a ban on the use of cryptocurrencies for payments. Parallelly, the Commission proposed a new rule that demands disclosure of service quality and IT usage information from crypto businesses including brokers, exchanges and dealers. According to the notice issued by the Thai SEC, businesses in the region have been advised against accepting crypto payments from April 2022 after discussing its implications with the Bank of Thailand (BOT). The joint study conducted by the BOT and SEC concluded …

On Thursday, the Reserve Bank of India, or RBI, the country's central bank, published a critical bulletin regarding the cryptocurrency industry. While the report praised the innovative distributed ledger technology associated with digital currencies, the RBI dismissed arguments calling for regulation of such assets and called for an outright ban. RBI's core concerns were related to cryptocurrencies threatening the country's financial sovereignty. The RBI wrote: "Historically, private currencies have resulted in instability and therefore have evolved into fiat currencies over centuries. The retrograde step back to private currencies cannot be taken simply because technology allows it without considering the dislocation …

Many members of the Ethereum Name Service’s decentralized autonomous organization have voted in favor of allowing recently removed director of operations Brantly Millegan to stay on as the ENS Foundation director. According to a tally of roughly 2.4 million ENS DAO users recorded as of Thursday, more than one million are against removing Millegan as director of the ENS Foundation. The users account for more than 42% of the vote, with 28.61% voting in favor of removing the ENS director and 29.29% abstaining with two days remaining to submit. “The DAO shall decide whether Brantly Millegan is deemed capable, or …

Bitcoin network’s proof-of-work mining consensus has been a topic of evironmental, social and governance (ESG) debates for a long time and a new study may only add to the growing controversy around BTC's carbon footprint. A new research report titled “Revisiting Bitcoin’s carbon footprint” published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Joules has highlighted that the Chinese crypto mining ban might not have contributed to the reduction in the carbon footprint of the Bitcoin network as propagated by many Bitcoiners, on the contrary, it has increased by 17%. China was the primary hub for Bitcoin miners before May 2021 and accounted …

After the Taliban took full control of Afghanistan in August last year, many international non-governmental organizations and services stopped operating in the country. Among them were payment services like Western Union and Swift. Many Afghans subsequently began to learn about cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology to — at the very least — receive remittances from abroad. As electronic payment services like PayPal and Venmo have never been available in the 5,000-year-old country, Afghans have lost many opportunities in the online business world. “We lost many opportunities like blogging, affiliate marketing and online dropshipping because most of them pay with …

As reported by Canadian news outlet The Globe and Mail, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada's federal police force) sent letters to several cryptocurrency exchanges demanding that they "cease facilitating any transactions" with more than 30 specific cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to the ongoing truck protests in the country. The letter writes: "Any information about a transaction or proposed transaction in respect of these addresses, is to be disclosed immediately to the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police." Just two days prior, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, representing the ruling Liberal Party of Canada, invoked the Emergencies Act in response …

T. Rabi Sankar from the Reserve Bank of India compared cryptocurrency to ponzi schemes and said that banning them, not regulating them, would be the “most advisable choice” for the Indian government. Sankar, the deputy governor for the RBI, told audiences at a keynote address on Feb. 14 that “We have also seen that cryptocurrencies are not amenable to definition as a currency, asset or commodity.” "Cryptocurrencies are not currencies, or financial assets or real assets or even digital assets. Therefore, it cannot be regulated by any financial sector regulator. It is not possible to regulate something that one cannot …

György Matolcsy, Governor of the Hungarian National Bank, has proposed a blanket ban on all cryptocurrency trading and mining operations across the European Union. Governor Matolcsy cited the recent crypto ban imposed by China in a blog post shared by the Hungarian central bank a.k.a. Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) titled “Time has come to ban crypto trading and mining in the EU.” He also pointed out the Russian central bank’s proposal that calls for a blanket ban on domestic cryptocurrency trading and mining. Reciprocating the proposals for a crypto ban, Matolcsy said: “I perfectly agree with the proposal and also …

Yet another statement by a top Indian official suggests that regulatory uncertainty around the status of digital assets in the country will persist in the near term. Responding to the general discussion of the 2022-23 Union Budget at Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of India’s bicameral parliament, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that she was not going to “legalize or ban” cryptocurrency at this moment. The minister added that “Banning or not banning will come subsequently,” when the ministry reviews input from consultations. Sitharaman also mentioned that the state has “the sovereign right to tax” income that citizens derive from …