Binance plans to delist 12 privacy coins, including Zcash and Monero, in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain on June 26, citing its “ongoing compliance processes”
Yogita Khatri / The Block :
Context & Ripple Effects
Binance is cutting privacy coins from four EU markets at a delicate moment: France granted it the region's first major regulatory approval in 2022, but the relationship has since soured into a probe over digital asset services and weak money-laundering controls, with ACPR now running AML checks that gate MiCA license eligibility across the bloc.
The move repeats a pattern regulators have driven before — Japan's FSA pushed exchanges off Monero and Zcash back in 2018, and Upbit delisted six privacy coins after FATF guidance — but this is the first time Binance has applied it across multiple large EU markets at once.
First-order effects
- Holders of Zcash, Monero, and ten other privacy coins on Binance in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain lose their primary liquidity venue effective June 26 and must withdraw or trade out within two weeks of the announcement.
- Binance directly reduces its own AML surface area in exactly the jurisdictions where its compliance record is under active scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- Other EU-licensed exchanges face the same FATF-and-MiCA logic, making a Binance-style privacy coin purge the likely template rather than a one-off, as it already was in Korea after Upbit's delisting.
- Privacy coins' trading depth concentrates on unregulated or non-EU venues, widening the spread between compliant-market prices and offshore liquidity.
Third-order effects
- If ACPR's AML checks and the MiCA licensing process keep rewarding delistings, privacy coins risk being structurally excluded from regulated European venues altogether — a de facto regulatory classification rather than an exchange-by-exchange choice.
- The episode hardens a global norm, visible since Japan's 2018 pressure campaign, that listing privacy coins is incompatible with holding licenses in major jurisdictions.
The trend: Privacy coins are being incrementally priced out of licensed exchanges worldwide as compliance requirements become the decisive listing criterion.