AML crackdown eclipses securities enforcement as crypto’s top regulatory risk: Report

📄Full Article· Automatically extracted by trafilatura3933 words

Notable AML-related penalties in 2025. Source: CertiK The surge in AML enforcement highlights regulators’ growing focus on compliance controls and financial surveillance, with penalties increasingly targeting operational failures rather than disclosure-related violations. The shift reflects both a change in US administration policy and a broader reassessment of the SEC's jurisdictional approach to digital assets, according to the report. Related: AMLBot says social engineering drove 65% of crypto cases it probed in 2025 Sanctions-related crypto volume grew over 400% year-over-year in 2025, driven primarily by Russia-linked networks and state-aligned stablecoin infrastructure, forcing regulators across all major jurisdictions to prioritize transaction monitoring and cross-border financial crime compliance over token classification disputes. European AML fines surged 767% over the same period, while Asia-Pacific regulators increasingly favor license revocations and business improvement orders over monetary penalties. The enforcement pivot coincides with broader global regulatory trends documented in the report. Stablecoin regulations, for example, are moving from design to implementation across major jurisdictions, with binding frameworks now operational from the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act to the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regime. Prudential standards for custodians and exchanges are tightening, with requirements now covering capital adequacy, asset segregation, liquidity management and recovery planning. The Basel Committee’s cryptoasset prudential standard, scheduled for implementation from Jan. 1, 2026, subject to local adoption, has also created what the report calls a “structural divide” for institutional adoption. Group 2 assets, including Bitcoin and Ether, face near-100% capital charges, making them economically difficult for banks to hold on the balance sheet, while Group 1 assets, such as tokenized traditional instruments and qualifying stablecoins, receive standard risk weighting. Related: Pierre Rochard warns US regulators over Bitcoin gap in Basel rewrite A CertiK research team spokesperson told Cointelegraph that banks managing digital assets under the oversight of regulators such as Singapore and the EU are already subject to this adjusted enforcement. CertiK said smart contract security assessments are increasingly being folded into licensing and compliance expectations across major markets, with security audits moving from voluntary best practice to statutory or quasi-statutory requirement across major jurisdictions within two years. Smart contract security regulator mandates. Source: CertiK That push for mandatory audits comes as regulators grapple with identifying accountability in decentralized finance. A European Central Bank working paper published in March, for example, found that governance in major DeFi protocols remains highly concentrated, complicating efforts to determine who should fall under MiCA oversight. CertiK’s analysis of the top 100 exploited protocols found that 80% had never undergone a formal security audit before a breach, and those unaudited protocols accounted for 89.2% of total value lost. At the same time, the report says infrastructure compromises such as private key theft and access control failures drove 76% of 2025 losses by value, as the threat landscape moved beyond code exploits. The spokesperson said that current regulatory audit requirements are in line with Web2 frameworks and that authorities generally delegate identifying relevant threats to supervised entities. While regulators may require yearly testing or various operational resilience efforts, such as source code reviews, they seldom prescribe a specific scope to avoid restricting the reach of such evaluations, they said. Magazine: Singapore isn’t a ‘crypto hub’ — it’s something better: StraitsX CEO

Data Status✓ Full text extractedRead Original (CoinTelegraph)

🔍Historical Similar Events· Keyword + Asset Matching6 items

2026-04-28

AML Crackdown Overtakes SEC Securities Cases as Top Crypto Risk, CertiK Finds

2026-04-28

Japan tells real estate and crypto sectors to tighten AML checks on property deals

Similarity 170%關鍵字 aml/crypto同分類 hot

2026-04-21

Ripple CEO Praises SEC’s New Direction as US Crypto Markets Brace for Regulatory Reset

2026-04-21

SEC Chair Drives Pro-Crypto Agenda as Innovation Exemption Nears for On-Chain Securities Trading

2026-04-19