Ripple CEO vows to continue crypto regulation legal battle with US SEC
The SEC is appealing a New York District Court ruling that rejected the regulator’s claim that Ripple Labs’ XRP token should be considered a security.
Taking to X, Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, said that “XRP’s status as a non-security is the law of the land today” and vowed to keep contesting the regulator in court.
The legal battlelines between Ripple and the SEC were first drawn in 2020 when the regulator brought a lawsuit against the crypto firm. The SEC alleged that XRP is an unregistered security, while Ripple claimed the token is a digital currency.
The ongoing court battle could drag on into 2026, as Garlinghouse insisted that Ripple will continue its legal case against the SEC in the appellate court. He added that the exchange was “once again taking the lead for the [crypto] industry.”
Gemini set to leave Canada over new crypto regulations
The prominent crypto exchange, Gemini, has announced plans to shut down its operations throughout Canada by the end of 2024 in response to tightening crypto regulations, in particular pertaining to how stablecoin and investor freedoms are to be governed.
A September 30 email to Gemini’s customers appeared on X advising them to withdraw all their investments from any accounts in Canada by December 31, 2024, with few exceptions, when the exchange will shut down their accounts.
The Canadian Government’s financial regulators, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), published their increased expectations of crypto asset trading platforms, both registered and unregistered, in the country on February 22, 2024. The CSA’s new crypto asset reporting framework is expected to become operational during 2026.
Gemini joined five other major crypto industry platforms, including OKX, dydx, Paxos, Bybit, and more recently, Binance, in withdrawing from the Canadian market in disagreement over aspects of the current CSA regulations. Global crypto platforms that are continuing to operate in Canada include Crypto.com, Coinbase, and Kraken.
Taiwan’s financial regulator announces new AML laws for crypto platforms
The Taiwanese government’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) announced its new anti-money laundering (AML) regulations for locally-based virtual asset service providers (VASPs) on October 1, 2024. Fundamental to the new AML regulation is that VASPs must register with the FSC by September 2025, or operators could face custodial sentences of up to two years or NT$5M (about $155K) in fines.
Under the draft title “Measures for Preventing Money Laundering and Combating Terrorism Financing by Virtual Currency Platforms and Trading Business Enterprises”, the new regime will replace the previous iteration and is set to be implemented on January 1, 2025.
VASPs registered under the old regime must re-register and comply with the new one. From now on, all VASPs will be required to submit annual risk assessment reports. VASPs were advised to delay registering until the new regime is wholly in place.
The FSC also stated its intention to propose further crypto-related regulations by June 2025, for which it intends to submit a draft by the end of 2024. The latest raft of laws came the day after the FSC announced its decision to allow professional investment in foreign virtual asset ETFs.
UK FCA opens new digital securities sandbox to financial sector
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), in partnership with the Bank of England (The BoE), announced on September 30, 2024, that its digital securities sandbox (DSS) was now open for business.
Firms in the financial sector seeking to test new digital innovations in finance—such as distributed-ledger technologies (DLTs)—can exploit the DSS to test how these developments will intersect with regulatory frameworks in a realistic but safe simulated environment.
The BoE and the FCA implored firms to apply to use the sandbox, and provided guidance on navigating the DSS ecosystem. The operational DSS is the culmination of the ambitious plans for supporting fintech innovation made by His Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) in April 2021. The DSS is scheduled to run until December 2028. Applications to firms interested in participating will be open until March 2027.
As well as firms gaining insights about how DLTs will function around legislative developments, the UK authorities also expect that the simulations will enhance their capacity to successfully implement and run the evolving regulatory framework.
Read more on Global Government Fintech.
Australian crypto ‘celebrity’ scams take Australians for AUS$43M
In Australia, Meta (formerly Facebook) has acted against the increase in celebrity deepfake scams targeting the country’s citizens via the social media platform, which reportedly cost Australians AUS$43.3M (about US$30M) from January through August 2024.
META’s Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) program (also active in the UK) is a groundbreaking intelligence-sharing tool used in partnership with Australian banks to zero in on accounts linked to celebrity deepfake scams. FIRE is reported to have already helped dismantle over 8,000 deep fake scam adverts, which claim to be endorsed by local Australian celebrities making fanciful financial promises to gullible citizens.
While the federal government’s National Anti-Scam Centre report on the first half of 2024 indicated improvements since the same period in 2023, it also noted that scams disproportionately target some Australians. One example cited was that over-55s reported nearly 48% of losses to scams.
