March 29, 2024

Several European cryptocurrency companies close due to fifth EU Directive

Mining pool Simplecoin and gaming platform Chopcoin will cease operations due to the fifth EU Directive onanti-money laundering, effective January 10 next year.

According to a notice on the Simplecoin website, the poolwill be closed on January 1 due to new rules that require the introduction of a customer identification system and anti-money laundering. The company does not intend to fulfill these requirements, as it has different views on the value of the personal data of its users.

“After the law comes into force, we will be obligedRequire our users to disclose identifying information to comply with European regulatory requirements. We believe that anyone should have access to mining, so we refuse to restrict our users and jeopardize their privacy,” — Simplecoin said in a statement.

Pool founder Christian GrigerGrieger) said his company has 2 employees who serve 42,000 users. He launched the service last August, along with Marvin Janssen.

Users will need to withdraw cryptocurrencies before December 20, and personal data in their accounts can be deleted before the end of the year. January 1, 2020, the platform will cease to function.

For the same reasons, terminatesThe Chopcoin gaming platform, which Griger also founded in collaboration with Joshua Stoffels in September 2015. The company also has 2 employees and more than 300 thousand users.

It is worth noting that none of Griger's projects attracted financing from venture firms or investors.

At the end of last week, the creators of the Bottle Pay payment startup announced a similar decision for the same reasons:

“We don’t want to take this step.The amount and type of additional sensitive data that we will be forced to collect from our users will have a very negative impact on the current user experience. We want to maintain integrity as a service provider and protect the interests of all participants in the ecosystem: team, investors and users. Therefore, a radical and painful decision was made - to close Bottle Pay,” — they wrote.

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