OKEx Korea Ends Support for Privacy Coins in Compliance to the Travel Rule

The Korean platform of the OKEx cryptocurrency exchange has announced plan to end support for certain digital assets from its platform. Privacy coins such as XMR, DASH, ZCASH, ZEN SBTC has been marked to be removed from the Korean exchange.
The firm revealed that the reason for the termination of support for the currencies is possible violations of laws or regulations or policies of government agencies. It also stated the customer protection one of the reasons for termination of support for the assets.
Citing catalyst for the removal of the privacy coins, OKEx Korea said it is in compliance with the “travel rule” which recommends that exchanges be able to collect relevant information such as the name and address of the sender and recipient of the virtual assets.
Since privacy coins do not allow collection of “relevant information”, it has decided to delist the assets.
OKEx Korea in a blog post gave details culminating to the decision to delist the assets. It provided that “In October 2018, the first General Assembly, the International Anti-Money Laundering Organization ( “FATF”) agreed to apply the criteria for Virtual Asset Service Providers. In February 2019, when the 2nd General Assembly was held, the statement in the footnote, except for the transfer of virtual assets, was finalized and announced in a statement.”
Transacting in the privacy coins will be terminated by October, 10th 2019. While withdrawals will be in two months after transaction support has been ended. That will be in December, 10th 2019.
As the assets are delisted, the following trading pairs will also be removed:
Monero (XMR): XMR / KRW, XMR / BTC, XMR / ETH, XMR / USDT
DASH: DASH / KRW, DASH / BTC, DASH / ETH, DASH / USDT
ZCache (ZEC): ZEC / BTC, ZEC / ETH, ZEC / USDT
Horizon (ZEN): ZEN / BTC, ZEN / ETH, ZEN / USDT
Super Bitcoin (SBTC): SBTC / BTC
As OKEx korea has decided to tow this path, other global exchanges could decide to be compliant to this rule. A move which could either create new ingenious markets for privacy coins or drastically reduce the available platforms to trade the privacy focused digital assets.