Cryptocurrency

Last week, China surprised the rest of the world with the issuance of a digital Renminbi. By doing so, the Chinese government became the first mover on the road to a digital central bank currency (CBDC) in form of blockchain-based units of national currency. Even though the project right now is limited to parts of […]

According to the basic idea of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was meant to be an electronic peer-to-peer payment system that would function directly between the users without the necessity of payment processors such as banks. The massive increase in value since the mining of the first Bitcoin – to almost 20.000 euros per Bitcoin temporarily – […]

After a lengthy back and forth, the German legislator last week finally decided on how to conduct the transposition of the provisions of the 5th European AML Directive into national law. The German Parliament accepted the recommended resolution of the 7th financial committee after the original draft of the federal government was heavily criticized by […]

A crypto exchange platform does not always have to be designed comparable to professional stock exchanges for requiring the operator to obtain a BaFin permission. Platforms not automatically matching and executing the buy and sell orders of the users can also be required to acquire a BaFin permission prior to its launch if it is […]

Most publications covering cryptocurrencies and e-money come to the conclusion that Bitcoins cannot be classified as e-money in the sense of the German Payment Services Act (ZAG) because of the fact that there is no emitter who issued the coins in the first place while such emitter is a prerequisite to the e-money definition according […]