Soda Labs

Bahamas

Issuance of privacy tokens barred, trading not

JurisdictionAmericasAttribution required

A regulated firm must be able to attribute activity to an identified person, and assets or accounts that make that impossible are barred at the licensed perimeter. This is a rule about attribution, not about whether amounts are public.

What Bahamas actually says

The Bahamas holds the sharpest contradiction in this section, and both halves are deliberate. Its 2024 act bars issuers from offering privacy tokens for sale in or from the jurisdiction, and makes the provision of anonymity-enhancing services a regulated activity. The nuance almost always dropped in reporting is that the bar is on issuance: trading and exchange of such tokens is not prohibited, so long as the business can meet its obligations while doing it. Meanwhile the country's own central bank digital currency ships a tier that requires no identification at all below modest limits. A state that will not let you issue a private token will let you hold its own money without giving your name.

The instruments that matter

Digital Assets and Registered Exchanges Act 2024
passed 29 July 2024, building on the 2020 act, and reported to provide that no issuer may offer privacy tokens for sale in or from within The Bahamas
The distinction that gets lost
the prohibition is on issuance; exchange or trading of privacy tokens is not prohibited provided the business can do so consistently with its regulatory obligations
Anonymity-enhancing services are now regulated
providing them is treated as a regulated activity rather than an unregulated one
Sand Dollar ships a no-identification tier
the lowest central bank digital currency tier carries a 500 dollar holding limit and 1,500 dollar monthly transaction limit with no identification requirement and no link to a bank account

What this means for confidential transactions

Bubble is built for exactly this shape of obligation: amounts and balances live on chain as ciphertexts, computation happens without decryption, and the only disclosure path is an on-chain access list through which an authorized party - an auditor, a supervisor, a counterparty - can request scoped decryption. That is confidentiality from the public, not from the regulator.

Compliant by default.

See how selective disclosure satisfies a supervisor without publishing your book to the world.