Letter to commissioner McGuinnes sanctioning of crypto-assets
8. März 2022
Letter to commissioner McGuinnes sanctioning of crypto-assets
Brussels, 08.03.2022
Dear Ms McGuinness,
Commissioner for Financial Services, Financial Stability and the Capital Markets Union
We are observing with great concern the developments on the crypto exchanges. Many financial experts and EU institutions such as the ECB rightly argue that one consequence of the sanctions against Russian banks and oligarchs is a shift from Russian private wealth to crypto-assets in order to circumvent the sanctions.
We therefore welcome your announcement together with the national finance ministers that you plan to carefully investigate possible shifts and to explore effective sanctioning of crypto-assets.
In that effort we call on you to carefully examine the shift from Russian financial capital to crypto-assets in the form of an impact assessment and to present your findings to the European Parliament.
We welcome the fact that, as a first step, listed organisations and individuals will be blocked from trading on the crypto exchanges.
In order to anticipate and prevent possible undesirable developments at an early stage, we kindly ask you to explore and potentially take the necessary regulatory steps to mandate crypto exchanges in the European Union to exclude Russian users from trading on their exchange.
In addition, we would like to draw your attention to the energy consumption of crypto-mining activities equalling that of entire countries, as ESMA has signalled. In a context where energy dependency to Russian gas imports has deep negative geopolitical consequences, we would like to request you the development of mandatory energy efficiency criteria for the crypto-mining with special attention to highly inefficient consensus mechanisms.
Sincerely,
Rasmus Andresen, MEP Greens/EFA
Ernest Urtasun, MEP Greens/EFA
Brussels 08/03/2022