Bitstamp Requires Its Users Provide Additional Info, To Align Itself With Regulators

Bitstamp cryptocurrency exchange moves forward to comply with regulations and requires its users to provide information about their original source of wealth.

The company informed its users about the change in the exchange’s policy via emails sent on Wednesday and asked them to submit additional information on the trading platform.

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As per the one user of Bistamp, the email reads:

We work closely with our regulatory partners to ensure we continue to be your trusted exchange. Towards this, we need your account information to be updated to provide you with the latest products and crypto.

To align itself with the regulation compliance, Bitstamp particularly appealed to its users to update the info about the origin of their digital assets stored on the platform.

Also, the exchange has officially published a number of documents that add examples of the documentation for the fiat-related sources of wealth of deposited funds, including payslips for savings, receipts of salary and pensions, mining payslips, and inheritance documents, gifts, and others. Similarly, crypto-related sources include withdrawals, deposits, login info, hand-written agreements, screenshots, etc.

The platform also requests its users to submit their legal docs like tax residency, nationality, place of birth, and ask for the info about net worth and annual income, annual deposits estimation, intended activities on the platform, and source as assets.

Before Bitstamp issued the latest notice, the exchange offered its users rewards on March 30 for submitting the required information. 

If you want to keep on using our services, you’ll need to update your account as some information is out of date. As a “Thank You!” we will reward you with a $25 bonus once you have completed your account info.

Bitstamp Disables Withdrawals For Users Not Providing Info

Those who do not comply with the rules will lose the chances of getting rewards, but their accounts are also at the risk of getting frozen, making users unable to withdraw the funds on Bitstamp. Hence, the exchange has previously disabled crypto and fiat withdrawal for those European customers who did not update the information about the source of the wealth of deposited funds.

And now, the cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp asks its customers to verify with legal documents where they got cryptos that are being operated on the platform. To be clear, it only includes the crypto assets purchased on the external crypto exchanges.

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In response to the sudden change in the exchange’s policy, the community has expressed anger at the move, with some saying the company didn’t inform before applying these rules. 

“You just can’t provide new rules when people have already deposited their crypto. If you want to change the rules of the game, you have at least given them a deadline before,” said a Bitstamp user on Reddit.

“We understand that not everyone is comfortable with providing so much information, and we especially understand it is very inconvenient,” said Lucas, an employee at Bitstamp. “However, please understand that we have to meet the demands of our regulators if we want to keep providing you with our services.”

Featured image from Pixabay and chart from TradingView.com