In what could be the surest sign that Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, is taking a serious approach to comply with US money-laundering regulations, the Tokyo-based company has registered as a money services business with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, (FinCEN).
The bitcoin exchange’s registration to FinCEN comes a few months after the latter issued guidelines that applied traditional money-laundering rules to digital currencies in an attempt to quell concerns of the latter’s potential role in money laundering. Although, Bitcoin wasn’t specifically mentioned in FinCEN’s new guidelines, the implication carried by the phrase “decentralized virtual currencies” was clearly pointed towards the fast growing digital currency.
And as the world’s largest bit coin exchange, Mt. Gox appears to be trying to cover all its bases to ensure that it’s a business that’s looked up on the up-and-up by US authorities, even if the registration does not mean it’s granted approval by the Treasury Department’s sub-agency.
Over the past few months, Mt. Gox has taken numerous steps to essentially bend over backwards to accommodate anti-money-laundering regulations. Back in May, the company announced that it was strengthening its accounts security system by requiring users to verify their accounts anytime they were making flat currency deposits and withdrawals.
Then, a few weeks ago, Mt. Gox temporarily suspended making US dollar withdrawals because of rising volumes of deposits and withdrawals from numerous markets that are getting into the Bitcoin craze. The Japanese-based company didn’t attribute this suspension of transactions to anything anomalous, instead admitting that the sheer volume of transactions has been difficult to keep up with, thus compelling the company to upgrade its system to make USD transactions easier.
