KYC & AML Compliance killing the purpose of Decentralisation? Enemies of anonymity?

Decentralisation is a storm that’s taking over the world and has achieved new heights of growth, in a short span of time, what any other industry experts could never have imagined. What started with the birth of bitcoin’s peer to peer transaction network has become a global industry with more than a trillion $ market cap. Decentralisation started a fire that has shaped the new world will keep changing how we interact with our Money, Internet & Data. Know Your Customer & Anti Money Laundering regulations came into place when the people involved in illicit activities started using Bitcoin’s network as a way to get away with their Criminal activities, and started using the Bitcoin infrastructure as a safe haven to store their earnings from these criminal activities by working under the wraps, hidden from the Governments & the Law. Many projects have been working closely on this loop hole trying to work according to the regulations and by abiding with the instructions from their respective governments, still there’s a lot of ways these criminals are evading the regulatory framework, and using what was originally designed to serve the global people for their agenda. Most of the Crypto exchanges have adopted KYC & AML regulatory Framework to stop these illicit funds from entering the market and further destroying the reputation of the Crypto market.

?Cardano developers decided to move forward with regulatory compliance of $ADA token, partnering with Coinfirm, provider of anti-money-laundering analytics. This makes a lot of sense yet it is a reason why the Token will suffer backlash & will further dip as it is very negative for the idea behind decentralisation and anonymity. But the excessive regulation was the reason for the death or our modern Financial System. With this announcement, it would seem ADA is following in their footsteps. Cardano still a free and decentralized network, now closer to becoming a censorship-prone, politicized, and manipulated network which completely goes against the purpose of decentralisation and Cryptocurrencies. CBDC’s and Facebook’s Diem are similar projects that are launching soon in the market but are controlled and manipulated by the elites and governments as the people who own these corporations are not working for the people or global community but are working with the agenda to monitor and access all the data from the crypto markets and use it for their own benefits. Building a new financial and economic layer, free from the control and repression of those who have brought our world economy to the brink of total failure was the main idea behind decentralisation. But now by excessive and aggressive centrally planned intervention, we’re slowly losing the agenda of a new global financial system that offers Freedom to the global community. It is exact opposite of the goal we wanted to achieve with decentralisation, as it is well known that so-called "AML" laws are put in place by the high priests of finance to ensure nothing escapes their view. This is very disappointing for the Crypto Community. Projects should be compliant with regulatory Frameworks but with the loopholes that exist in the projects and the Framework, Individual projects can be compliant but whole decentralized networks adopting these measures is very bad for the Decentralised revolution and anonymity and can be the reason for the death of freedom of these decentralised networks as they will be working under constant watch from the negative aspects of the global market which want to control and own all these networks. Base layer of these networks must be neutral and apolitical to be free from negative intervention or manipulation. Mainly, all crypto projects need to be aware of a fact that the established financial elites & governments will NEVER accept the new kid in the block AKA the crypto industry itself. If you play by their rules, you are doomed for your demise. There are two sides to the crypto industry.

1. The darks side that says “The government is evil, no regulations for crypto ever”

2. The side that’s says “let’s be a legitimate company that enterprises and corporations can use”.

Which leaves us with a question, how do we expect blockchain to be mass adopted without any KYC or AML regulations in place to stop bad factors & their negative agenda? In the future people will be able to use Smart Contracts to issue marriage licenses, land ownership/ deeds, social credit. As seen with the NFT mania and the growth of marketplaces, the use cases of these Non fungible tokens are endless and will shape the future of Digital ownership. Expecting this revolution to happen without people actually being able to self-identify and KYC will be stupid, AML is a key piece of the future. We can’t expect a global system to totally be outside of the Watch and yet still scale to billions of users. If Ethereum had been doing this for a long time, because they allow those ERC-20 tokens to be traded on centralised exchanges without KYC it wouldn’t be possible, In fact such things are basic requirement for these centralised exchanges. But Ethereum doesn’t have AML/KYC implemented, none of the blockchains have implemented KYC & AML yet. But the centralised exchanges need to be compliant with these regulations is they want to work in their respective countries under the law and regulations. Working towards the right Regulations that are not affected by any bad factors or any agenda should be the goal of the Projects and Community to achieve the Real goal of the decentralised revolution. KYC & AML are just used by these Elites to control the markets and manipulate the economic freedom of global community. Right direction for these regulations will surely help in mass scale adoption and controlling the bad actors in the market at the same time.

Prateek Gupta