Travel Rule UK: What Crypto Businesses Must Do in 2025

When you send crypto in the UK, the Travel Rule, a global anti-money laundering requirement that forces crypto firms to share sender and receiver details on transactions over £1,000. Also known as FATF Rule 16, it’s not optional—it’s enforced by the FCA, the UK’s financial regulator that oversees all crypto businesses. If you run a crypto exchange, wallet, or payment service here, you’re legally required to collect, verify, and transmit this data—or face fines, license revocation, or criminal charges.

This rule isn’t just about big players. Even small crypto businesses, P2P platforms, and DeFi intermediaries are caught in its net. The AML rules UK, the broader set of anti-money laundering obligations that include the Travel Rule, KYC checks, and transaction monitoring have tightened since 2023, and by 2025, the FCA is actively auditing firms that skip compliance. You can’t hide behind "we’re decentralized" or "our users are anonymous." The FCA doesn’t care. If you handle crypto in the UK, you’re a VASP—Virtual Asset Service Provider—and you must act like one.

What does this mean in practice? When someone sends you £1,500 in BTC, you must know who sent it, verify their ID, and pass their name, address, and wallet address to the recipient’s provider. Same if you send out. No exceptions. No loopholes. Even if the recipient is on another platform, your system has to trigger the data transfer. Many firms still think they can avoid this with private wallets or off-chain swaps—but the FCA is tracking those flows too. In 2024, they shut down a UK-based P2P platform for failing to report over 12,000 untracked transactions.

And it’s not just about fines. Banks are cutting off crypto businesses that don’t comply. If your bank account gets frozen because your AML controls are weak, you’re done—even if you’re technically still licensed. The FCA crypto registration, the mandatory process to legally operate as a crypto business in the UK isn’t a one-time form. It’s an ongoing obligation. You need updated KYC systems, staff training, audit trails, and real-time monitoring tools. The FCA expects you to prove this every year.

There’s no sugarcoating it: the Travel Rule makes crypto harder to use in the UK. But it’s not the end of innovation. It’s the price of legitimacy. The businesses that survive are the ones building compliance into their core—not as a checkbox, but as a feature. You can still offer fast, private, peer-to-peer trading. You just can’t ignore the rules. The posts below break down exactly what’s required, what’s changed in 2025, and how real companies are handling it—without getting shut down.