Binance announced yesterday that it’s Spanish subsidiary, Moon Tech Spain has secured a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registration from Spain’s economic governing body, The Bank of Spain.
This registration means that the world’s largest decentralized exchange can now offer crypto assets exchange and custody services in the country. Moon Tech Spain had applied for the license registration on 28th January 2022 and their registration was confirmed and approved on 7th July 2022.
In his announcement tweet, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) also confirmed that Binance will give 100% compliance to the requirements of the Bank of Spain’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CTF) rules.
Local director of Moon Tech Spain, Quim Giralt also said that Binance will significantly expand their reach of operations to every part of Spain to make their cryptocurrency services available to everyone in the country.
This announcement comes as part of a series of important breakthroughs made by Binance in securing license for operation in Europe. Earlier in May, Binance France announced that they had secured a Digital Assest Provider (DASP) license to operate in the country.
Later that month, Binance also announced that they had been cleared to become fully operational in Italy. In subsequent years, Binance hopes to be able to secure operational licenses for the whole of Europe.
There are still concerns over the regulation of cryptocurrency in Europe as crypto assets are largely unregulated. Crypto service providers are only tasked with showing enough effort to combative money laundering through their platforms which is deemed as not enough by some economic decision makers in European countries.
A member of the French parliament had sounded out France’s market regulator to revoke Binance’s operational license registration on the grounds of a Reuters investigation into money laundering on Binance.
The report from the investigation showed that Binance was used as a conduit to launder over $2.35 Billion illegally. The French parliament is yet to make a statement on whether they will take the report seriously or not.
Featured image source: MetaCrunch
