Cryptocurrency Regulation in Europe: The Netherlands & Germany

The Netherlands will start to regulate firms trading in cryptocurrency starting in January of 2020. So, if business wishes to continue to perform transactions via crypto, they must register with De Nederlandsche Bank or the Dutch central bank. Here on September 3rd, the Dutch central bank released a statement saying the next. “In concrete terms, firms offering services for the exchange between cryptos and regular money, and crypto wallet providers, must register with De Nederlandsche Bank.”

Moreover, it’s important to note that the Netherlands does not denote cryptocurrency as being a legal tender. However, due to a court ruling in 2018, Bitcoin is considered to have legitimate transferable value. By the way, there is precedence that as such cryptocurrency is subject to taxes, especially when considering gains and losses. 

Then this declaration has been a long time coming. The Dutch Minister of Finance, Wopke, Hoekstra, received official advice from the Netherland’s Authority for the Financial Markets and central bank. He said that a licensing system should be created to control cryptocurrency services. So, in July, Dutch ministers had pushed for regulation as well. This comes as cryptocurrency exchanges are suspected of money laundering schemes. 

To sum up, the Dutch banks are not the only entities as of late to impose regulation on crypt currency firms. This seems to be a growing trend throughout the world. In the next five years the cryptocurrency markets will likely be as regulated as financial markets. This will remain even more true of companies like Facebook do enter into the crypto financial markets.