Binance caves to pressure over coin listings, scoring a win for privacy

Privacy advocates scored a big win in June with Binance’s announcement that it was backtracking on a decision to delist privacy coins for users in a number of European countries.

As a result of the move, users in Italy, Poland, Spain and France will be permitted to continue trading tokens including Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), Decred (DCR), Horizen’s ZEN, Verge (XVG), Dash (DASH), Secret (SCRT), Firo, Navcoin (NAV), MobileCoin (MOB), Beam and PIVX.

Banning the coins would have been a big, big mistake. Privacy coins empower individuals against financial surveillance by offering enhanced transactional security, and crypto communities should be thankful that Binance is no longer planning to remove them from its listings. In the modern climate of excessive surveillance and overall lack of confidentiality for users everywhere, their significance cannot be overstated.

Related: Binance was wrong to boot Monero, Zcash and other privacy coins

These coins’ fungibility, which makes each individual unit interchangeable and censorship-resistant, is an advantage they hold over almost every other cryptocurrency, and losing these additional layers of security and anonymity would have been an incredible loss for the community.

Privacy coins have gained traction in recent years due to the surfacing of a series of harsh regulations. Binance’s decision, in fact, comes on the heels of the European Union ironing out its much-discussed standards for digital assets, the recent Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations. Having just signed this into law, July will also see the European Securities and Markets Authority launch a MiCA consultation process. It’s fair to say that there’s quite some movement in the space, and we may not have seen the last of what Europe has in store for the crypto industry.

But the truth is that privacy is a fundamental human right protected by the United Nations. Article 12 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy” and that “everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks,” so why should crypto be any different?

This concept is even more crucial in the digital era as data exploitation risks increase exponentially and tech giants…