Austrian FMA Calls For Tighter ICOs, Crypto Regulations
In the latest news, the Austrian Financial Market Authority or FMA’s board of directors, Klaus Kumpfmüller and Helmut Ettl, have offered proposals suggesting the implementation of stricter regulations on initial coin offerings (ICOs) and digital currencies. Kumpfmüller, in particular, proposed a so-called “threshold-dependent” prospectus requirement, which is aimed at ICOs. This requirement is reportedly the same to that of securities.
Setting A ‘Reasonable’ Threshold
Kumpfmüller basically wants to implement a threshold, which he calls “reasonable,” of two million euros. In addition, he believes that there must be a concession obligation of sorts for all distributors of cryptocurrencies. To him, these should all be “treated like securities in the future.”
Ettl, on the other hand, compared the proposed regulations to existing restrictions imposed on every financial institution. To put it simply, a mini-bank license is required for an entity to either purchase or sell foreign currency. So far, however, trading digital assets has no analogous regulation of the same under Austrian law. Last year, the FMA gave out about 30 statements about suspected legal violations related to both cryptocurrencies and ICOs. These statements were submitted to the public prosecutor’s office.
Discontentment And Disputes
Reports say that the FMA board members are quite discontented with Hartwig Loger, who is Austria’s Finance Minister. He is looking to strip the agency of some of its authority. In one of the many disputes between the auditing authority and the FMA, Loger suggests a more “regulatory responsibility at the ministerial level,” stating that the agency should “reasonably execute” the said level.
The only catch, however, is that there is no evidence of serious problems in terms of supervision and accounting; hence the transfer of competencies would only be regarded as a decision based on political agenda. Ettl said that it is crucial for the FMA to retain a supervision that is both “integrated and dependent.”
As far as tightening regulations on cryptocurrencies and ICOs, the FMA and the Finance are not so distant in their objectives. When Loger called for such regulations to be implemented in the digital asset industry, as well as for early regulations at the European level, the two above-mentioned board members approved. They even offered voluntary participation in a “Fintech Regulatory Council” which Loger initially proposed. Obviously, this implementation would somehow affect the way digital assets or tokens work, though only time can tell how significant the impact would be.