Lawsuit Bitonic vs Dutch Central Bank
update 7 April: judge upholds opbjections Bitonic against DNB
Newsarticles lawsuit: NRC / FD / Trouw / Telegraaf / BNR
Tuesday 23 March the lawsuit that we have filed against the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) will be brought before the administrative court in Rotterdam regarding the wallet verification requirement. Despite our repeated requests to DNB to withdraw this ineffective technical requirement, this has remained a strict condition to become registered.
We have always made the utmost effort to comply with the legal obligations applicable to us as a company, including identification and verification of our customers and transaction monitoring. The fact that we need to subject our customers to full KYC/AML procedures is beyond dispute, and is explicitly out of scope for this preliminary injunction.
We do however feel we've been left no choice but to go to court to ask for an independent ruling on the legality of the additional requirement set by DNB to verify the wallet addresses of our customers.
For the sake of our customers
Aside from the fact that verifying every address for every transaction has no technical merit, it is also a serious violation of our customers' right to privacy. Who are now obligated to provide us with proof of where they store their bitcoins.
We therefore request immediate suspension of this specific requirement. To end this continuing infringement and in order to allow us to operate according to the same European rules that also apply internationally.
Practical information
The lawsuit starts at 10:00 AM CET on Tuesday 23 March. We published an extensive explainer on bitcoin.nl on the core reasons of the lawsuit. For other information and relevant news items that we have published: