Cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex announced a new account tier — dubbed Level 1 — allowing for up to $10,000 in daily withdrawals without requiring full Know Your Client (KYC) onboarding.
According to the announcement published by the exchange on Dec. 19, the new account tier has been created in reaction to user feedback. The post reads:
“We’ve heard your feedback time and time again about wanting to use Poloniex without giving up your identity. We’ve wanted to make this a reality for a while now and are sorry it has taken us longer than we’d like.”
Anonymous trading
From now on, new users are able to sign up on Poloniex without KYC and access unlimited deposits, spot trading and withdraw up to $10,000 per day. To set up the accounts, users reportedly only need to provide an email address and choose a password. The tier also grants access to the platform’s competitions, staking service and chat. The exchange also suggests taking extra steps to ensure the account’s security:
“As with any account, we highly recommend setting up 2FA as soon as possible to provide an extra layer of security.”
Data reported on the official website shows that level 1 accounts do not have access to margin trading, lending, fiat currency wires. Furthermore, they have limited 2FA recovery, manual password resets, manual fund transfers and fund recovery functionality.
Poloniex is currently upgrading customer accounts and unfreezing existing unverified accounts. Still, the process will take a few months to reach the users. As of press time, Poloniex CEO Tristan D'Agosta did not answer to Cointelegraph’s inquiry about the number of accounts and quantity of funds to be unfrozen. This article will be updated upon receipt of that information.
Interestingly, those regulations seem to contrast with the current trend toward regulation prohibiting custodial cryptocurrency services to anonymous users. As Cointelegraph recently reported, the Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, which will be adopted in the European Union by Jan. 10, requires that crypto exchanges based out of the EU only accept users that undergo KYC.
As a consequence of increasingly strict regulation, Bottle Pay service, which allowed users to send Bitcoin (BTC) via social media accounts, decided to shut down. Later this month, crypto gaming platform ChopCoin and mining pool Simplecoin also announced their shutdown because of KYC requirements.