OKEx has announced that its South Korean arm plans on cleaning up its lists of supported digital currencies. While there hasn’t been any word from the exchange of the reason for the decision, everyone in the crypto community knows that, at some point, certain currency projects will either fade away or be forced out, and this could be an indication of that eventual consolidation.
According to an announcement on OKEx South Korea’s website, the exchange is going to drop support for Monero (XMR), DASH, Horizon (ZEN), Zcash (ZEC) and Super Bitcoin (SBTC). All five will be delisted and transaction support will be terminated on October 10 at 5:00 PM local time. The change will also impact several trading pairs, including:
• Monero (XMR): XMR / KRW, XMR / BTC, XMR / ETH, XMR / USDT
• DASH: DASH / KRW, DASH / BTC, DASH / ETH, DASH / USDT
• [Zcash] (ZEC): ZEC / BTC, ZEC / ETH, ZEC / USDT
• Horizon (ZEN): ZEN / BTC, ZEN / ETH, ZEN / USDT
• Super Bitcoin (SBTC): SBTC / BTC
Part of the reason OKEx has made the decision to withdraw support for these particular currencies is over concerns that keeping them listed would make it difficult for the exchange to adhere to regulations recently presented by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). In accordance with the FATF’s so-called Travel Rules, crypto transactions will soon need to carry identifying markers to indicate the sender and recipient involved in the exchange.
The countries that comprise the G20 have already stated that they would work in accordance with the FATF’s guidelines, even though the task force doesn’t have any direct regulatory authority. This has led to several companies, such as CipherTrace, already introducing solutions to facilitate transactions in the new and improved Bitcoin space.
The Travel Rule is going to impact a lot of privacy-centered digital currencies, those that are built on the misguided belief that crypto should be anonymous. As has been predicted from the start, “dark coins” that believe more in anonymity than privacy are going to fail as regulations tighten, and OKEx’s decision to delist these five currencies is a good indication of what is going to come.
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