YEREVAN, June 1. /ARKA/. Armenia’s State Revenue Committee (SRC) has formally asked the Central Bank to regulate the digital asset industry by enforcing a cryptocurrency legislation, SRC head Rustam Badasyan said today.

He said the lack of legislation hinders combating criminal activities and enables shady transactions.

'We already have had some cases when cryptocurrencies were used to avoid taxes and launder money," he said during parliamentary hearings on the execution of the state budget last year.

Badasyan also said that an investigation was launched into provision of a large sum of cash in exchange for the purchase of cryptocurrency, but it has not yielded any results because of the lack of relevant legislation.

Earlier, Seyran Sargsyan, the Executive Director of the Union of Banks of Armenia, stated that financial institutions in Armenia do not regard cryptocurrencies as legal tender and do not service such assets.

According to him, issues like identification of clients dealing with e-currency, as well as transparency and other related problems connected with money laundering, need to be regulated.

According to the World Economic Forum, there are 18,142 cryptocurrencies, 460 crypto-exchanges and the marked cap of cryptocurrecmies amounts to about $2 trillion. Every 24 hours, $91 billion worth of cryptos are traded, most of them Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Analysts have warned that the industry is so large it could have macroeconomic consequences if mismanaged. They says piecemeal approaches to cryptocurrency regulation must be replaced by a globally coordinated framework.-0-