Blockchain, thanks to its transparency, offers authorities a qualitatively new way to combat organized crime in the financial sector. This was stated by representatives of Europol.

The discussion took place as part of the Sixth Global Conference on Crime Finance and Cryptocurrencies, held in The Hague last week. Participants included European regulators, law enforcement agencies, representatives of the Binance exchange, and analytics companies Chainalysis, CypherTrace and TRM Labs.

They agreed that the spread of cryptocurrencies contributed to the emergence of new forms of crime. Attackers use digital assets for drug trafficking, match-fixing, financing the production and purchase of weapons of mass destruction, and money laundering.

“Nevertheless, the ability to track transactions enabled by blockchain technology makes it easy to find and recover stolen funds,” the experts said.

Europol is waiting for the approval of the new bill on the regulation of cryptocurrencies, which has been passed by the EU authorities. Micawill strengthen control over the alternative financial market.

The developed rules will, among other things, require crypto exchanges to collect and store information that identifies participants in transactions, as well as forward this data to the authorities upon request.

At the same time, the EU Parliament decided to refuse to track private, non-hosted wallets.

Europol added that overall, equating cryptocurrencies with traditional assets from a legal standpoint would greatly simplify the confiscation, management and conversion of coins to fiat.

Previously, the IMF called for “catch up” in the regulation of digital assets.

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