The EU’s New Crypto KYC Regulations Targeting DeFi are Designed to Keep the World's Poor Living in Poverty

The EU is demanding that DeFi platforms in the EU enforce KYC, effectively ensuring that the world's poor remain living in the poverty that European imperialists placed them in.

I want to preface this by saying that I know that most people reading this most probably don’t live in poverty in a third-world country.

However, most of the world’s population does and I, personally, have experienced having lived in a couple of third-world countries in the past.

According to the World Bank, there are around 1.7 billion people around the world who don’t have access to any form of banking, depriving them of many modern luxuries that we all take for granted.

Money matters and having access to the kind of facilities that banks offer really matters. I want you to consider how much harder your life would be without the following:

• a place to store and earn interest on your savings/investments

• secure and reliable ways to be paid for your work or by your clients

• fast transaction networks which you can use to pay for goods/services

• access to easy credit and loan facilities

Your life would be difficult.

However, 1.7 billion people around the world live like this (many in poverty).

These individuals also tend to live in countries where financial opportunities are scarce, government corruption is rife and hyperinflation is the norm.

So, what chances do these people have? Not many.

DeFi Could Have Offered New Opportunities

DeFi, however, could have offered them a much-needed way out by granting individuals and small businesses in developing countries:

• Easy crypto-backed credit and loans

• Business services like payment collection

• Interest on their savings/investments and so much more…

DeFi is also an attractive option for the world’s unbanked because many will lack essential documents (think passports, driver’s licenses, bank/credit statements) to perform the KYC protocols often required by centralized exchanges and other financial institutions.

I’ll go as far as say that DeFi’s most important use case is providing financial services for the world’s unbanked. At least that’s what Satoshi Nakamoto intended.

But The EU Isn’t Happy

The EU wants to change this, however, by forcing DeFi platforms based in the EU to implement KYC. Worse… are plans to force any DeFi platform based outside the EU to implement KYC if it wants to transact with DeFi platforms based inside the EU.

Many of the people DeFi was meant to provide opportunities to will not be able to provide the required documents for KYC and will be robbed of the opportunities that DeFi could have provided them.

Why? Blame the gluttonous egotistical bureaucrats in the EU.

Europe has spent the best part of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries exploiting the world’s poor. Now, the EU seems hellbent on keeping that legacy; by making sure that the world’s poor don’t ever crawl out of the gutter that their imperialist ancestors put them in.