FinCEN withdraws proposed $10,000 crypto private-wallet reporting rule

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has withdrawn its proposal requiring banks and crypto exchanges to report transfers above $10,000 to or from unhosted wallets, the agency said in a news release announcing the withdrawals. The rule, first proposed in December 2020, never took effect.

The $10,000 rule would have obliged banks and money-service businesses, a category that includes crypto exchanges, to file reports whenever a customer sent more than $10,000 in crypto to or from an unhosted wallet, meaning a wallet the user controls rather than a financial institution. The threshold applied to amounts aggregated over 24 hours, so several smaller transfers in one day could have triggered a filing. Firms would also have had to collect information about the customer and the wallet on the other side of the transfer.

FinCEN withdrew the proposal on Sunday, October 5, along with a separate 2023 proposal that would have classified crypto mixing transactions as a primary money-laundering concern, a designation that allows the government to impose additional reporting requirements on financial institutions handling the activity. Neither rule had ever been finalized.

The agency framed both withdrawals as part of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda and an effort to make digital-asset rules “fit-for-purpose.”

The 2020 proposal was issued in the final weeks of the first Trump administration, drew thousands of public comments and sat unresolved for nearly six years across two administrations. Its formal withdrawal removes a compliance question that exchanges serving U.S. customers had carried since it was published, and rolls back the planned anti-money-laundering designation for privacy tools. Existing Bank Secrecy Act obligations for these firms remain in force.