The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Federal Reserve Board have withdrawn their 2020 plan to cut the travel rule threshold from $3,000 to $250 for transfers that begin or end outside the United States, crypto transfers included. The joint withdrawal notice was filed for public inspection on Friday 6 November 2026 at 8:45 am Eastern time (13:45 UTC) and is scheduled to appear in the Federal Register on Monday 9 November. That publication date is the legal date of the withdrawal: the text says the proposal is withdrawn “as of” the day it is published.
For anyone sending crypto through a US exchange, nothing changes. The $3,000 line that has applied since 1995 stays where it is, and the two agencies say they “will not take further action” on the 2020 proposal.
The door is not shut for good, though. The agencies present the withdrawal as a way to give the public “certainty” that no final rule will come without a new round of public comment. A lower threshold could return one day, but only as a fresh proposal open to comment.
The crypto news site The Defiant reported the withdrawal at 14:04 UTC on Friday, about twenty minutes after the filing, and read it the same way: the $3,000 line stays, and so does FinCEN’s existing guidance for crypto transfers. As of Friday evening, we found no press release from FinCEN or the Fed.
What the travel rule notice withdraws, and what stays
Two US rules are at stake. The Recordkeeping Rule, issued jointly by the Fed and FinCEN, requires banks and non-bank financial institutions such as money transmitters to collect and keep information on funds transfers of $3,000 or more. The Travel Rule, issued by FinCEN alone, requires them to pass that information on to the next institution in the payment chain. Together they form what the crypto industry calls the travel rule.
The proposal of 27 October 2020 (85 FR 68005) wanted to lower both thresholds to $250, but only for transfers that start or end abroad. Domestic transfers would have kept the $3,000 limit. Comments closed on 27 November 2020, a month after publication.
A second part of the plan was aimed squarely at crypto. It would have rewritten the definitions of “payment order” and “transmittal order” so that the word “money” in both rules clearly covers convertible virtual currency (CVC), the term FinCEN uses for most cryptocurrencies, as well as digital assets with legal tender status. That clarification is withdrawn too.
The notice is signed by Jimmy L. Kirby, deputy director of FinCEN, and by Benjamin McDonough, secretary of the Fed’s Board.
Why FinCEN and the Fed backed off after five years
The agencies give two reasons. The first is time. More than five years have passed since the proposal, and they say they would want new feedback from the public before adopting anything similar.
The second is crypto itself. The notice says there have been “significant recent developments in the CVC industry” since 2020: markets have matured and new legal frameworks are emerging. As an example it cites the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed on 18 July 2025, and it points to the White House digital assets report of July 2025. Any future change to the two rules for crypto, the agencies write, should be weighed against those developments so that it is “fit for purpose”.
The 2020 proposal drew nearly 3,000 comments, according to the notice, from banks, money services businesses, trade groups and individuals. A large majority were near-identical form letters, and most opposed the cut.
The objections were broad. Commenters said a $250 line would weigh heavily on smaller institutions and could push people who send money home toward less regulated channels. They warned that many more transactions would fall under the rules, and that firms would carry more liability for the personal data they had to store. Many noted that suspicious transfers below $3,000 already reach FinCEN through suspicious activity reports (SARs). Some argued the threshold should go up, not down, because of inflation since 1995. Others raised privacy and the Fourth Amendment, or said one month was too short to comment.
On the crypto clarification, views split along industry lines. Crypto companies and their trade groups were against it, citing technical limits and the lack of an international messaging standard for CVC transfers, while some banks and money transmitters supported it.
Why $250: the case FinCEN made in 2020
The original proposal leaned on FinCEN’s own data. It analysed about 2,000 SARs filed by money transmitters between 2016 and 2019 on transfers potentially linked to terrorist financing. Those reports covered about 1.29 million underlying transfers, and about 99% of them began or ended outside the United States.
The amounts were small. The mean transfer was about $509 and the median about $255, according to the 2020 text, and about 71% of the transfers were at or below $500. That is the logic behind the $250 figure: a $3,000 threshold lets most of these payments move without the sender’s details travelling with them.
FinCEN also cited the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global standard setter, whose Recommendation 16 lets countries use a de minimis threshold of no more than USD/EUR 1,000 for cross-border wire transfers. Below that line, the names and account numbers of sender and recipient should still travel with the transfer, but they need not be verified unless there is a suspicion of money laundering or terrorist financing. A $250 US threshold would have gone well below that benchmark.
The crypto clarification that never became a rule
According to the 2020 proposal, FinCEN had already said in May 2019 guidance that CVC transfers carried out by a non-bank financial institution may fall within the two rules. The same text noted that at least one industry group disputed this, arguing that crypto is not “money” as the rules define it. The proposal described its own crypto clause as a way to codify FinCEN’s “existing expectation”.
With the withdrawal, that codification will not happen through this rulemaking. For US-registered exchanges and other money transmitters, the practical position is the one they have worked with for years: collect and pass on customer details for covered transfers of $3,000 or more, on top of the usual know-your-customer checks.
The rules bind institutions, not individuals. A person moving coins between two self-custody wallets is not a financial institution and is not directly covered by either rule.
A month after the unhosted wallet proposal went the same way
Friday’s notice closes the second of two crypto proposals FinCEN drafted at the end of 2020. On 6 October 2026, FinCEN formally withdrew its unhosted wallet proposal (91 FR 63514), first published on 23 December 2020. That plan would have required banks and money transmitters to report crypto transactions above $10,000 (counted over 24 hours) with unhosted wallets, or wallets hosted in jurisdictions FinCEN named, and to verify the customer’s identity, with record-keeping from $3,000. The October notice used almost the same words as Friday’s: FinCEN “will not take any further action”.
The same day, FinCEN also withdrew a third crypto proposal (91 FR 63513): its October 2023 plan to declare international crypto mixing a class of transactions of primary money laundering concern under section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, with extra recordkeeping and reporting for firms that handle it.
Other regulators have moved the other way on self-custody. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority recently listed extra checks on unhosted wallet deposits as good practice, without setting any threshold.
Travel rule in the EU: crypto data from the first euro, the US at $3,000
Europe went the other way. Since 30 December 2024, the EU’s Transfer of Funds Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1113, has required crypto-asset service providers to send the originator’s and beneficiary’s details with every crypto transfer. The regulation’s recitals say crypto transfers should face the same requirements “regardless of their amount”, whether they are domestic or cross-border, because crypto prices can swing within a very short time and make linked transactions harder to track.
Self-hosted wallets get their own treatment. For a transfer above EUR 1,000 to or from a self-hosted address, the provider must check whether the address is owned or controlled by its own client. Below that amount, the details are collected, usually from the client, but the provider is in principle not required to verify the person behind the self-hosted address.
The regulation is directly applicable in every member state, so there is no national threshold to look up. In France, the AMF applies the European Banking Authority’s travel rule guidelines to crypto-asset service providers through its position DOC-2024-08, applicable since the same date. The rules sit alongside the MiCA licensing regime explained in our guide to MiCA.
| Rule | Threshold | Status |
|---|---|---|
| US Recordkeeping and Travel Rules (since 1995) | $3,000 | Unchanged |
| US 2020 proposal, cross-border transfers | $250 | Withdrawn, legally on 9 Nov 2026 |
| FATF Recommendation 16, de minimis | USD/EUR 1,000 | Maximum countries may use |
| EU crypto transfers (TFR) | None, from the first euro | Applies since 30 Dec 2024 |
| EU check on self-hosted addresses | Above EUR 1,000 | Applies since 30 Dec 2024 |
So the US keeps a threshold three times the FATF benchmark, while the EU uses none at all for crypto. That does not by itself make the US rules non-compliant: whether they meet FATF standards is a matter for FATF’s own country evaluations, and Friday’s notice does not address it.
What happens next for US crypto transfers
The withdrawal takes legal effect when the notice is published on Monday 9 November. From then on, the 2020 proposal cannot be finalized: any new attempt to lower the threshold, or to write crypto into the definition of money, would start with a new proposal and a new comment period.
The notice does not say whether such a proposal is planned, nor when. Its references to the GENIUS Act suggest where US anti-money laundering work on crypto is now focused. On 10 April 2026, FinCEN and the Treasury’s sanctions office OFAC published a joint proposed rule (91 FR 18582) setting anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance programmes for permitted payment stablecoin issuers; its comment period closed on 9 June 2026. The Act itself takes effect no later than 18 January 2027, as covered in our GENIUS Act timeline.
Congress is also changing. Elizabeth Warren is set to chair the Senate Banking Committee after this week’s elections, which reshapes the odds for the CLARITY Act and for crypto rules more broadly.
The next date is Monday’s Federal Register, when the withdrawal becomes official. Until a new proposal appears, a crypto transfer through a US platform faces the same $3,000 travel rule line that was set in 1995.