Western Union blocks transfers to Cryptocurrency exchanges

Western Union (WU), which is one of the largest operators of international transfers, launched a campaign against remittances involving cryptocurrency exchanges. The decision, which also complies with the Company's internal regulations, is an attempt to impede the provision of services and transactions related to cryptocurrencies. At Reddit in early December, a post appeared, the author of which asserts that the company advised the Kraken crypto exchange to not process transactions related to digital currencies, as this contradicts its internal rules.

It is expected that such WU solution will negatively affect the work of Cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as the use of digital money by people. Given the growing popularity of Cryptocurrency, in the long term the company risks losing a large part of the audience, which will undoubtedly affect its income.

The move by WU to ban transactions involving cryptocurrencies is similar to the actions taken by different financial providers around the world which prevented their customers from buying and selling digital currencies. Several banks have also gone a bit further by closing accounts involved in the trading of virtual currencies.

This trend of prohibiting transactions involving digital currencies is very unfortunate as the virtual tokens continue their growth and slowly but surely gaining approval from the general public. Although this is a bad precedent to the virtual currency market, it is expected that this ongoing trend will have little impact on the continuous growth of the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as well as the lesser-known virtual currencies.