On 29 June 2022, the Council of the European Union published a press release to announce that the Council Presidency and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the proposal updating the rules on information accompanying the transfers of funds (TFR) by extending the scope of those rules to transfers of crypto-assets. The press release explains that:
- The introduction of this “travel rule” will provide the EU with a solid and proportional framework that complies with the most demanding international standards on the exchange of crypto-assets, in particular recommendations 15 and 16 of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF);
- The aim is to introduce an obligation for crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to collect and make accessible certain information about the originator and the beneficiary of the transfers of crypto-assets they operate. This will ensure traceability of crypto-asset transfers in order to be able to better identify possible suspicious transactions and to block them;
- The new agreement requires that the full set of originator information travel with the crypto-asset transfer, regardless of the amount of crypto-assets being transacted.
