Privacy tokens underwent nearly 60 delistings by centralized exchanges this year, a record since 2021, according to a recent Kaiko report.
The report tracked Monero (XMR), Dash (DASH), Decred (DCR), Mask (MASK), Rose (ROSE), and Zcash (ZEC). XMR suffered the most delistings, with a 6x yearly increase, while DASH experienced the second-highest number of delistings.
According to the report, these delistings are primarily driven by regulatory pressure in various jurisdictions over the past years.
Regulatory pressure
According to Chainalysis, Japan banned privacy coins’ trading in 2018. In 2020, Australian and South Korean regulators followed this move and started pressuring crypto exchanges.
Other significant jurisdictions that have banned privacy tokens include the UAE, which released its crypto rules last year, and the EU, which implemented the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
Surging regulatory pressure has resulted in many crypto exchanges delisting privacy tokens. Kraken recently removed access to XMR trading pairs for European users, while Binance completely delisted the token from its platform.
Additionally, OKX delisted its privacy token trading pairs in January of this year, while Huobi started its removal efforts in September 2022. All of the exchanges cited regulatory pressure as the primary factor behind their decisions.
According to the Kaiko report, crypto trading platforms facing lesser regulatory scrutiny, such as Poloniex and Yobit, have captured part of the trading volume for privacy tokens.
The two exchanges now represent nearly 40% of the trading volume for top privacy tokens, up from just 18% in 2021.
Additionally, the demand for these tokens has become so high on these platforms that they often exceed order book liquidity, the report added.