EU 2027 AML regulations to take effect: 27 member states to ban cash payments over €10,000, Monero/Zcash fully delisted by CASPs

The EU's Regulation 2024/1624 (AMLR) will take effect simultaneously across all 27 member states on July 1, 2027. Core measures include a ban on cash payments exceeding €10,000, a requirement for CASPs to prohibit anonymous accounts, and mandatory two-way KYC for crypto transfers over €1,000. For the crypto industry, this is a double-edged sword: the cash ban may push a large number of European consumers toward compliant stablecoins, but privacy coins such as Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) will face delisting from all exchanges. While personal self-custody wallets are not covered by the ban, the threshold for interaction with regulated platforms will significantly increase. (Context: EU MiCA crypto regulation to take full effect by the end of the month! Experts warn of impending chaos, where are the controversies?) (Background: Cutting off the money supply! MiCA requires EU stablecoin issuers to hold "30–60% cash" reserves, drawing complaints from Circle.) The 27 EU member states will simultaneously ban cash payment transactions exceeding €10,000 starting July 1, 2027—the first time the EU has achieved cross-border mandatory consistency in anti-money laundering legislation. The European Parliament officially passed Regulation 2024/1624, the "Anti-Money Laundering Regulation" (AMLR), in May 2024. According to official EUR-Lex texts, member states may set stricter thresholds based on this framework, but they may not relax them. For the crypto industry, the €10,000 cash ban is merely a prelude; the regulation's constraints on "Crypto-Asset Service Providers" (CASPs) are the core battlefield. Article 79 of the AMLR explicitly states that credit institutions, financial institutions, and all CASPs licensed in the EU are prohibited from maintaining any form of anonymous accounts for customers. The direct impact of this provision falls on privacy coins: crypto assets like Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC), which are designed to make transaction paths untraceable, will be completely prohibited from custody and trading by all regulated CASPs—if exchanges continue to delist them, it is not a choice but a legal obligation. Beyond privacy coins, the regulation simultaneously compresses the space for anonymity in general crypto transactions. The AMLR requires that for any crypto transfer exceeding €1,000, CASPs must verify the identities of both the sender and the recipient, effectively tightening the threshold compared to the relatively loose $1,000 limit originally implemented under the FATF Travel Rule in the Eurozone. The regulation also establishes a new EU anti-money laundering authority, "AMLA" (Anti-Money Laundering Authority), to directly supervise up to 40 of the largest CASPs distributed across 6 member states. The threshold for triggering direct supervision is having more than 20,000 active users within the EU or an annual transaction volume exceeding €50 million. Leading exchanges licensed in the EU, such as Binance and Coinbase, are highly likely to fall under the direct jurisdiction of the AMLA. The establishment of the AMLA marks the EU's shift from "member state-level supervision" to "federal-level direct intervention," which is consistent with the overall architecture of MiCA—the EU is consolidating fragmented crypto regulation into a unified front. The impact of the AMLR on the crypto industry is not one-sided. From the perspective of adoption dividends, the comprehensive ban on cash payments over €10,000 actually creates a demand gap for compliant digital payment tools. When European consumers conduct large cross-border or commercial payments, if cash channels are blocked, stablecoins—especially those already regulated under MiCA, such as USDC—will form a natural alternative. Issuers like Circle that have obtained MiCA licenses in the Eurozone are expected to expand their market share in this wave of "cash displacement." However, the B-side costs are equally clear. BeInCrypto cited a clarification from Circle's Director of Policy, Patrick Hansen: the AMLR's regulatory targets are intermediaries (CASPs, exchanges), and personal self-custody wallets are not within the scope of the ban; users can still freely hold and peer-to-peer transfer assets. Hansen's explanation effectively suppressed some of the panic among retail investors. But the reality is that when mainstream CASPs fully delist privacy coins and enforce two-way KYC for transfers over €1,000, self-custody wallet users will still encounter higher verification thresholds if they need to interact with compliant platforms (deposits and withdrawals). The essence of the AMLR is the EU incorporating crypto assets into the same anti-money laundering framework as traditional finance—not