The crypto news today show that the Bottle Pay service – which allowed users to send Bitcoin through social media accounts – is shutting down due to new European regulations. The service announced that it will be closing its operations due to the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
As the announcement shows, the funds will remain available for withdrawal until 13:00 GMT on December 31, 2019. Bottle Pay is a service developed by the United Kingdom based company known as Block Matrix. It enabled Bitcoin payments to any social media contact regardless of whether they had an actual account or not.
Two months ago and before the new European regulations and AML standards, Bottle Pay raised $2 million in funding and had the main aim of increasing the user base by ten times over the next year. However, as a custodial Bitcoin wallet provider based in the UK, the company was subject to the new European regulations and was forced to comply with the 5AMLD EU regulation coming into effect from January 10, 2020.
According to Block Matrix, the additional user information that the new regulations require would “alter the current user experience so radically, and so negatively, that we are not willing to force this onto our community.”
Meanwhile, the new European regulations led to new signups, deposits and social media bots going online. The funds that are already sent through Bottle Pay will not be claimed and returned to the sender within 7 days. On top of this, the withdrawal function will be taken offline too and all the wallets will close at 13:00 GMT on December 31, 2019. Any of the funds remaining in the Bottle Pay wallets will be donated to the Human Rights Foundation.
At the end of the day, Bottle Pay is not the only service that shuts down due to the new European regulations and AML standards. Before it, we could see a similar service for micro payment tipping on Reddit which closed – but for different reasons. Tipjar, which was designed for sending Ether and was popular in the ETH news then, shut down due to lack of user interest.
With the regulations getting more and more strict, businesses find operation a challenge unless they do something to obtain all certifications.
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