Financial Action Task Force (FATF)

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the intergovernmental body that sets global standards against money laundering and terrorism financing. Founded by the G7 in 1989 and headquartered in Paris, it issues 40 recommendations that member jurisdictions, more than 200 countries and territories through its network, are pressed to implement, with laggards placed on public grey and black lists.

Why it matters

FATF has no direct legal power, yet its standards become national law almost everywhere, because grey listing raises a country's cost of accessing the global banking system. For cryptocurrency, the pivotal move came in 2019, when FATF extended its rules to virtual asset service providers and applied the travel rule, its recommendation 16, requiring exchanges to collect and transmit sender and recipient information for transfers above a threshold, commonly 1,000 dollars or euros. That single guidance reshaped exchange compliance worldwide and pushed identity requirements deep into an industry built on pseudonymous addresses. Self custody wallets remain outside FATF's direct reach, though guidance pressures firms to scrutinize transfers to and from them.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

FATF style rules bind the intermediaries around both assets, gold dealers and refiners on one side, exchanges and custodians on the other, while the bearer assets themselves stay unregulable at the protocol and metal level. The practical difference is visibility: gold moving through informal channels leaves no ledger, while bitcoin leaves a permanent public trail that compliance software mines. Privacy advocates argue this makes bitcoin the more surveilled asset in practice, not the less.