The Estonian Ministry of Finance released an official clarification of the recently submitted draft legislation that stirred up rumours about a possible ban on cryptocurrencies.
The bill, which still needs to undergo three parliament readings, was drafted and submitted in a bid to tighten the existing crypto service providers licensing, and will not affect individuals who own and trade cryptocurrencies, according to the rebuttal.
"The regulation is applied to virtual asset service providers {VASPs) who conduct activities for or on behalf of a natural or legal person as a permanent business, not apply to customers. This means that the legislation does not contain any measures to ban customers from owning and trading virtual assets and does not in any way require customers to share their private keys to wallets."
According to the Ministry of Finance, the proposed regulation that still needs to pass the parliamentary hearings, will not affect individuals who own crypto through a private wallet not provided by a VASP.
"However, accounts opened with Estonian VASPs cannot be anonymous and Estonian VASPs cannot offer anonymous accounts or wallets," it added, clarifying that the "identifying information must be retained in a way that would enable it to be linked to the transaction, similar to bank transfers."
"As someone who actively invests, holds, stakes, pools tokens in DeFi as a resident of Estonia, both privately and through my Estonian companies (for own use, not serving others), I see no change or impact to my ability to do so," pointed out Sten Tamkivi, who joined Skype as an early executive and helped to see the company grow into Estonia's first unicorn.
BREAKING:
Estonia is NOT banning crypto.
Finance Ministry @rahadus just released a rebuttal to some ugly speculative rumours that started going around over New Year: https://t.co/WA4t6x2a2k
-Sten Tamkivi (@seikatsu) January 3, 2022
"Estonia is a county with a mere million people (so we actually can talk to our politicians!) that has produced seven Web2 unicorns and has 1B+ EUR annual early tech investment run rate in 1200+ startups. We will sort out eight Web3 too, don't worry. Including sensible regulation," added Tamkivi.
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