Singapore’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws aimed at preventing terrorist financing and money laundering thereby protecting Singapore’s financial integrity, and for this, the AML acts issue guidelines and acts of legislation for various financial institutions; stripping off the privacy features from the Komodo (KMD) cryptocurrency is a step towards that development.
Accordingly, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which is the central bank and financial regulator of Singapore responsible for regulating the financial sector and promoting the economic sectors of Singapore, came out with a decision, that required all projects listed on any exchange that is incorporated in Singapore to submit new legal opinions.
The legal opinions would be based on whether the assets listed on any exchange comply with the AML laws of Singapore and falls within the scope of “Capital Markets Product” sectioned under the Securities and Futures Act of Singapore.
To bring KMD, which is a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency under the securities laws of Singapore, some of the privacy features of KMD was were stripped off by the financial regulators of Singapore. On February 15, 2019, some of the shielded transactions were also disabled on the KMD chain. Komodo’s current technology aims at developing end-to-end blockchain network that can be customized into a Smart Chain network with built-in modules and an open API for developing blockchain-based applications.
Considering Singapore’s crypto laws to be the most stringent in the world, this step is expected to help eliminate money laundering and financial crimes in all the jurisdictions. As KMD is listed more than a dozen exchanges incorporated in Singapore, including Binance, Huobi, Upbit, Liquid, Global, and Bittrex, this legal opinion is necessary for KMD to submit for establishing compliance with the AML regulations of Singapore.
In this way, Singapore strongly focusses on the financial regulations surrounding the crypto market, thereby playing a significant role in fighting against money laundering. However, independent of the legal opinion and considering the legal strength of Komodo, KMD will continue to be listed on the exchanges like Binance and Liquid. Komodo is considered as the top multi-chain architecture in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Due to this reason, on August 11, 2020, Binance enabled crypto pairs KMD/BUSD and KMD/USDT on their platform.
