Bye Bye Privacy Coins? Is Bittrex Starting A Regulatory Trend?

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John McAfee, who’s currently in a Spanish cell awaiting extradition to the US, famously said that the only crypto he thought to be very useful was Monero as it guaranteed anonymity.

You may have seen that the three best-known privacy coins, Monero, Zcash and Dash didn’t have a very good start to 2021 so far. In fact, in CoinMarketCap’s top 100 they can be seen as some of the only losers of the year so far.

This is because of the news that Bittrex, a popular crypto exchange, launched on 1 January 2021 via their Twitter account.

#Bittrex Customers:

The $XMR, $ZEC, and $DASH markets will be removed on Friday, January 15th at 23:00 UTC.

Details: https://t.co/8qAdjuwryJ

— Bittrex (@BittrexExchange) January 1, 2021

They stated that the markets featuring those three coins would be removed as from 15 January 2021. Unfortunately, crypto analists expect this trend to accelerate.

Final withdrawal by Valentine

In an announcement on their site, the Bittrex crypto exchange warned customers that they would delist cryptocurrencies Monero (XMR), Dash and Zcash (ZEC), all 3 coins best known for their anonymous transactions.

In all, 11 quoted currency pairs with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT) and the dollar will be withdrawn from Bittrex’s trading offer as of Friday, January 15.

From there, not only will trading no longer be possible, but Bittrex customers will only have 30 days to withdraw their MNR, DASH, and ZEC from the platform, which would bring us to February 14, Valentine’s day, for the final withdrawals. The worst part is that Bittrex gave no reason for this delisting.

Obviously, given the anonymous component of the three cryptos in question, we suspect that there is a future regulatory fear which is in tandem with the SEC lawsuit that was recently launched against XRP and the fear that regulators have of Facebook rolling out its own crypto at the end of January.

Also South Korea is planning in 2021 to ban privacy coins and new European regulations also force companies to delist privacy coins.

The goal of the governmental maneuver is, without any doubt, to remain able to tax everything that can be found of course, just look at what Canada’s Trudeau demands of his crypto investors.

Seeing the bull run that crypto has been on in recent weeks, it is not too surprising that crypto exchanges decide to take the first step themselves.

The question simply remains: is this the beginning of a trend or an overreaction?

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