1/ There is an interesting situation going on now with Shapeshift and Changelly. The regulatory pressure is apparently increasing as Shapeshift is now imposed to KYC its customers by the end of the year. Changelly started withholing Monero due to “high risk” KYC concerns.
2/ It’s now clear that if a company is not decentralized (can be shut down) or not based in a very friendly jurisdiction, it will either be shut down or imposed to comply with KYC/AML. This is also why Augur rushed to terminate the kill switch because they feared an intervention
3/ The so called instant exchanges (Shapeshift, Changelly, ChangeNOW) will most likely become obsolete and be replaced by decentralized exchanges, which can’t be shut down. It will be interesting to see whether the regulators also try to chase after non-KYC non-U.S. exchanges
4/ The situation with Changelly is particularly messed up. The spokesperson said: "When a customer refuses to provide the required data, we cannot simply return coins as we wouldn’t like to operate and transfer coins that might be potentially stolen or raised by fraud."
5/ This situation is particularly bad for privacy advocates and for anyone using privacy coins. Until there is a functioning decentralized exchange with enough liquidity as well as atomic swaps, it's gonna be tough out there.
6/ The privacy movement is so resilient that I suspect that this development will accelerate innovation and advance the development of decentralized exchanges and atomic swaps.
