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C.J. Volten

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Investigating the Effects of the 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive on Cryptocurrency Exchanges in the Netherlands

By converting between currencies, cryptocurrency exchanges provide access between the traditional and cryptocurrency ecosystem, making them susceptible to money laundering. The European Union extended the scope of the 5 Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) to include cryptocurrency exchanges, requiring them to obtain a registration, conduct customer due diligence, and report unusual transactions. It is, however, unknown whether the measures introduced by the implementation of AMLD5 lead to less risk exposure and what impact it has on cryptocurrency exchanges. This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to explore the effects of the Dutch implementation of AMLD5 measures on cryptocurrency exchanges active in the Netherlands. We analyzed over 335,000 transactions and complemented them with seven qualitative interviews with Dutch cryptocurrency exchanges and the supervisory authority. We find that the Dutch implementation of AMLD5 imposed high administrative burdens and substantial fees on relatively small exchanges that do not pose high money laundering risks. This raises questions about the alignment of the goals and consequences of the regulation. ...
Journal article (2018) - Anneke Zuiderwijk, Cécile Volten, Maarten Kroesen, Mark Gill
National governments often expect municipalities to develop toward open cities and be equally motivated to open up municipal data, yet municipalities have different characteristics influencing their motivations. This paper aims to reveal how municipality size influences municipalities' motivation perspectives on opening up municipality data. To this end, Q-methodology is used, which is a method that is suited to objectify people's frames of mind on a particular topic. By applying this method to 37 municipalities in the Netherlands, we elicited the motivation perspectives of three main groups of municipalities: (1) advocating municipalities, (2) careful municipalities, and (3) conservative municipalities. We found that advocating municipalities are mainly large-sized municipalities (> 65,000 inhabitants) and a few small-sized municipalities (< 35,000 inhabitants). Careful municipalities concern municipalities of all sizes (small, medium, and large). The conservative municipality perspective is more common among smaller-sized municipalities. Our findings do not support the statement "the smaller the municipality, the less motivated it is to open up its data". However, the type and amount of municipality resources do influence motivations to share data or not. We provide recommendations for how open data policy makers on the national level need to support the three groups of municipalities and municipalities of different sizes in different ways to stimulate the provision of municipal data to the public as much as possible. Moreover, if national governments can identify which municipalities adhere to which motivation perspective, they can then develop more targeted open data policies that meet the requirements of the municipalities that adhere to each perspective. This should result in more open data value creation. ...