MEXC About To KYC?

Not that we knew it wasn't coming

Everything is getting KYCed in the surveillance economy and corporations can't really go against it. That is, perhaps they can by e.g. locating to a more crypto friendly jurisdiction, but even so it seems that they might go with the flow. Take MEXC as an example. For several weeks they are now telling their customers upon login to KYC - it's not mandatory yet, but it could easily be a first step to roll out full KYC. My hope was that they could roll out a regional based KYC, since the exchange simply has to follow the laws in each region they are operating in. But it's obvious that this can be easily circumvented by a VPN, so they could run into some problems when regulators start poking in their noses. The safe way is to just go full KYC, the obvious downside is that CEXs will lose a significant amount of volume due to users moving their funds into DeFi.

I guess we just have to see what happens. So far I have heard of "June" being the month when it could get serious. I would recommend moving essentially all your funds off of MEXC if you haven't KYCed - we don't want to log in one day with funds in our account and saying with have to KYC to move them.

Does it even matter anymore?

DeFi has evolved so rapidly int he last several years that we have to wonder if CEXs are actually still worth the trouble (that is if you value your privacy). The problem for some coins like HIVE was that they haven't had a DeFi connection and relied upon CEXs. But as it so happens, exactly when we need it the most, the Hive community is actively solving just that. We are getting L2 smart contracts and (hopefully) a deep liquidity pairing of W.BTC and HIVE by @vsc.network. That alone would already solve the problem. But there is more: We have @brianoflondon continually improving the @v4v.app which gives us BTC lightning accessibility. And on top of that @khaleelkazi has done some amazing work by adding a LEO-CACAO pair to Maya.Swap. This makes L1 swaps with Hive to e.g. BTC possible and already has around $100k in liquidity.

Shifting dynamics

It's clear that there will be a growing divide between CeFi and DeFi. We essentially have to decide which game we want to play. And if we dare to enter DeFi it could very well mean that our funds could get locked up there with difficult or at least inconvenient ways of accessing the fiat world. Who knows, maybe parallel economies like what Hive and HBD is achieving in Venezuela could grow and become an option even in the global north. But that would probably be confined to smaller transactions.