Just weeks ago, almost anyone with $6,000 could establish a crypto trading platform, which led to the flooding of the cryptocurrency industry in the country with scammers and financially unreliable organizations. Now, Turkey wants to regulate cryptocurrency trading with anti-money laundering and terrorism funding rules. 

Early on Saturday the president of Turkey published a decree that expanded rules governing cryptocurrency transactions. From now on, ‘crypto-asset service providers’ will be regulated in accordance with anti-money laundering and terrorism funding laws, reports Reuters. The new rules have already been published in the Official Gazette, so they are effective immediately. 

Among other things, crypto exchanges will be responsible for making sure that ‘their assets aren’t used for any illegal purpose,’ reports CoinGape. One of the ways to do this is to verify customers, which is not particularly easy for small companies. Furthermore, anti-money laundering and terrorism funding regulations usually involve very complex accounting, which is also likely too expensive for small platforms. Eventually, the number of crypto firms will decrease in the country and that is going to happen rather sooner than later. 

Two large cryptocurrency exchanges with daily trading volumes of tens of millions of U.S. dollars collapsed in late April. In one case, the founder of a crypto firm reportedly disappeared with $2 billion in cryptocurrency.  

Back in April Turkey already banned the usage of cryptocurrencies for B2B and C2B transactions citing risks (and obviously lack of any supervision from the government). The country’s central bank also banned the usage of cryptocurrencies for all kinds of payments.