TL;DR Breakdown
- Bittrex would stop trading privacy coins on its platform by January 15
- The firm had earlier announced that it was delisting XRP
Top crypto exchange, Bittrex, has announced that it would stop trading Monero, Zcash and Dash by the 15th of this month on its platform.
According to the firm, the reason it could delist a token was going to be due to the ever-changing regulations and policies guiding the operations of the industry and compliance issues. However, the firm did not say which of the reasons highlighted above was why it delisted those privacy coins.
Generally, privacy coins are crypto assets that offer transactions that can not be traced. Transactions involving Bitcoin and other digital assets can still be traced, this is almost impossible with privacy coins. Monero’s transactions, for example, are automatically private while other privacy coins like ZCash and Dash offer their users an opportunity to select between going private or not.
In recent times, there has been a lot of crackdown on privacy coins by the authorities as they believe that the asset is being used to perpetuate illegal activities. When one considers that Darknet market site, White House market, only accepts Monero transactions because of its privacy feature, then the fears of the authorities are seen.
Bittrex also suspended trading XRP
Bittrex is one of the large numbers of crypto trading exchanges that have delisted Ripple’s native token on their platform.
Earlier this week, the firm had announced that it was going to stop trading XRP on its platform due to the litigation between Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple over if XRP is a commodity or not.
Ripple has denied any wrongdoing on its part and has vowed to stand-up against SEC general bullying of the crypto industry.
And due to the severity of the news, the price of the token had suffered massively before finding a level of support around the $0.20 level.
Regardless of that, crypto exchanges like Bittrex, Binance, Coinbase and other have announced that they were suspending the token by this January.