Huobi to Delist Monero and Privacy Tokens on Regulatory Account

Huobi Global has unveiled its plans to delist privacy tokens, counting Monero (XMR), Dash (DSH), Decred (DCR), Firo (FIRO), Verge (XVG), Zcash (ZEC) and Horizen (ZEN) as the digital assets that will be affected.

The delisting process starts today as all deposit support for the cryptocurrencies has been halted. Huobi said its users who still have some funds in any of these digital assets would have up to September 19 to liquidate their positions into their spot wallets.

According to the exchange, any user who did not exit their respective trade position by then will see the trades automatically closed for them by the Huobi and credited into their spot wallet.

The delisting of these privacy coins can be attributed to mounting regulatory pressures and the failure of the coins to comply with their internal compliance policies. Effectively, the delisting of these tokens is supported by the exchange’s Token Management Rules of which Article 17(16) provides for delisting if “The token is a privacy token, does not support offline signatures, or its node source codes are not open-sourced”.

While Huobi, one of the major global digital currency trading platforms, did not ascertain whether the crackdown moves on the privacy coins were based on its compliance efforts from a request from a regulatory body in the regions it currently plies its trade, the firm sure wants to stay on the good books of these market watchdogs.

Huobi has faced some backlash from some regulators in the past year and has been asked to move its business away from Thailand. Despite this, the exchange has been making targeted efforts to enter the US market, with its subsidiary receiving the Money Service Business license from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as reported by Blockchain.News back in July.

With the scrutiny on privacy coins building up, Huobi believes it's high time it delisted the coins.

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