Newly-released rules for Indonesia’s cryptocurrency sector have been met with concern by industry players, who accuse the government of limiting the industry’s effectiveness, as reported by the Jakarta Post.
New government regulations, given the green light last week, require cryptocurrency traders to maintain a deposit of IDR 80 billion (Indonesian rupiah or approximately USD 5.7 million) in order to participate in futures trading activities. Cryptocurrency traders will also be required to have a minimum paid-up capital of a further IDR 800 billion (USD 56.7 million).
The Indonesian markets regulator, the Trade Ministry’s Futures Exchange Supervisory Board (Bappebti) issued Ministerial Regulation No. 5/2019 that also requires traders to have client support personnel who have been registered as certified security practitioners in order to operate.
The industry in Indonesia has made its objections clear, arguing that the Bappebti are penalizing the cryptocurrency industry in a way that hasn’t been the case with other sectors of the economy. Traders argue that the minimum capital requirement, for example, exceeds what is demanded when launching a rural bank, and dealers in conventional futures commodities require a lower paid-up capital in order to operate.
Under the new regulations, cryptocurrency futures traders in the country will need to store transaction records for at least five years, with the proviso that at least one of their servers are located in Indonesia.
Although the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been banned by the Bank of Indonesia (BI) futures trading is quite legal after rules were put in place last year. The country has experienced a trading boom despite the ban on actual cryptocurrency use, with reports last year that that crypto traders were expected to outnumber stock traders with time.
In other news from Indonesia, a Jakarta man was arrested this week for operating a mining program using a college computer. The 22-year-old former student at the college has been accused of using a HoneyMiner program to mine Bitcoin and Monero on 27 college computers.
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