These essentially include venues used to exchange digital assets against legal currency, and providers of custody solutions for digital assets. To satisfy anti-laundering obligations, these platforms must be registered. But to address risks relating to security, market integrity and price manipulation, an optional label could be granted at the service provider’s request by the AMF after a more in-depth investigation, in order to provide security for the service offered to users. The regulation of venues used to exchange digital assets for legal currency, in France and elsewhere, is a key issue for obvious reasons, as these platforms are the interface between the virtual and real worlds and hence where risk can spread from the former to the latter. As you are doubtless aware, the authorisation and labelling schemes mentioned in the PACTE Bill are optional. But there is an exception when it comes to anti-money laundering and terrorist financing (AML/TF) mechanisms. European regulators have been firm in their resolve not to compromise in any way on this matter. Accordingly, the Fifth European Anti-Money Laundering Directive makes all participants handling digital assets subject to applicable AML/TF provisions. This is consistent with the system in place since 2014 in France, which states that an exchange of crypto-assets in euro requires a payment services provider authorisation, and, accordingly, compliance with AML/TF rules.
They are no longer confined to cards, as we are seeing with the rise of mobile payments. A broader range of participants: I am thinking here about how the payments market has expanded to include competition from big techs and major retailers, which are following a wide range of strategies in this respect. The flipside of this trend is the increasingly global nature of the market, which is raising sovereignty and independence issues, including the question of control of data with respect to the American and Chinese tech giants. Payment is becoming less prominent: nowadays the actual act of paying is becoming less visible, as it is combined seamlessly within the overall transaction process to minimise the impact on the payer. We are seeing this shift in online payments, for example, which are designed to be increasingly fluid through solutions such as one-click buying. Availability of payment services: payment services are becoming more available, ignoring physical borders and time constraints to satisfy customer demand for instant, continuous and uniform payment services, as economic agents become ever more mobile. 2. The development of crypto-assets naturally forms part of these underlying trends affecting payment instruments, combining the search for anonymity, management of non-intermediated peer-to-peer payments and the use of entirely web-based technologies. But crypto-assets are also different because of their financial, monetary and technological features that I mentioned in my introduction.