Marathon mined the first AML and OFAC compliant bitcoin block

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Marathon has announced that it has mined the first fully AML and OFAC compliant bitcoin block. 

Marathon Digital Holdings is a digital asset company that mines cryptocurrencies, and it has made all of its hashrate available to the Marathon OFAC Pool, which is the first mining pool fully compliant with US regulations. 

In doing so, it mined a block, number 682170, which adheres to the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC) anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. 

OFAC administers and enforces the United States’ economic and trade sanctions programmes against targeted foreign governments, individuals, groups and entities, consistent with the country’s national security and foreign policy objectives. 

In particular, the pool refrains from processing transactions such as those listed on the US Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN), thereby ensuring that all bitcoin mined by the pool comply with US regulatory standards.

As of May 1st, Marathon placed all of its hashrate into the new OFAC pool, so all blocks mined by Marathon will be produced in a manner that complies with US regulatory standards. 

The CEO of Marathon, Fred Thiel, said: 

“We’ve built Marathon into one of the leading Bitcoin miners in North America, and we are always looking for innovative ways to improve on that position and to better our industry as a whole by enabling more institutions and individuals to participate. The mining pool we recently launched is an archetype of our philosophy and approach to the industry. Today, the majority of Bitcoin’s global hashrate is concentrated in pools in a single country outside the United States, and there is little regulatory oversight of how U.S.-based miners process transactions. We believe the concentration of mining pools and the lack of oversight pose potential risks to our industry”.

Reactions to the “regulation-compliant” Bitcoin blocks mined by Marathon

This initiative, however, has not been well-received by all bitcoiners. 

Indeed, some have begun sending non-OFAC-compliant transactions to the Marathon pool in protest, in an attempt to discredit them.

Obviously, these are transactions in other blocks that are not mined by Marathon. 

 

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