More than 65,000 comments have been made, most of them in opposition to the US Treasury regulation proposal.
It has been the crypto world’s talk in the past weeks: the United States Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) wants to force the cryptocurrency exchanges to record and report specific transactions.
Now it seems that more feedback and concern about the proposal has been delivered directly to the source.
The Regulations.gov website shows that 65,617 total public comments have been made about the rule, as Jake Chervinsky spotted it from Compound Labs and the Blockchain Association. It was a decennial increase from two days ago when the site showed only 6,537 public comments.
The public comments’ deadline was supposedly on January 4, a fast change after the December 18 announcement. But following the ire of the US Congress members about a “rushed process,” specifically after the holidays, the deadline was discreetly extended to until today. It’s still short of the 60-day period that US representatives requested.
The crypto community has taken advantage of the opportunity and responded in force to the proposed regulations. As of now, just over 5,000 of the comments can be viewed on the website. While they vary widely in size and detail, they are critical of the proposed rule, advising that it will have a blow to financial privacy. Many are calling it unconstitutional.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the latest rule will force exchanges to record any transaction to a private wallet of $3,000 or higher and then report to FinCEN any $10,000 or higher transaction. The proposal was rumored for weeks before the announcement last month. Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO, got in front of the news, tweeting a thread last November 25 about his objections to the expected rule.
“If this crypto regulation comes out, it would be a terrible legacy and have long-standing negative impacts for the US,” Armstrong wrote. “In the early days of the internet, there were people who called for it to be regulated like the phone companies. Thank goodness they didn’t.”
Recently, representatives from Coin Center, Fight for the Future, Blockchain Association, and Electronic Frontier Foundation have held a joint Reddit AMA to respond to the questions and encourage resistance versus the proposed rule. With the help of the sudden burst of opposing comments, they might have a chance.
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