Trading Crypto With My Bank Account

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Benjamin2002 Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/149334 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. I want to be a crypto trader and trade cryptocurrencies with my bank account. How it works is the seller would put his coins into an escrow account, the buyer will transfer him the money, and then the seller will release the coins. This type of crypto trading is called P2P trading, and fewer fees are involved. I plan to trade about 5 to 10k every day. I will most likely make smaller trades (under 1k) with Zelle and larger trades with wire transfers. Since I will be depositing and withdrawing large amounts of money from my bank account every day, would there be any risks of being reported for, say, money laundering even though I'm just trading? If I "do a substantial amount of business in the US," I will need to register with FinCEN, but what defines a substantial amount? Is trading crypto even considered as doing business? It feels more like investing, or in a sense, gambling. What other legal precautions should I take? An alternative to using my bank account would be using services like PayPal or Wise. Would that be safer? Since it is normal for people to send and receive money daily on those platforms. Should I take any legal precautions while transferring cash on these platforms? My goal is to trade crypto for fiat on P2P trading platforms like LocalBitcoins. However, I do not want to use centralized exchanges or trade crypto for stablecoins on decentralized exchanges. So, how can I do P2P trades safely? Thanks a lot!

External answer — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: S Spring Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/155453 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. The business seems to be a money transfer service and that is regulated by FinCEN when in the U.S. And some type of designated bank account might be required. But also institutional crypto custody might be required because just having a business doesn't make someone a fiduciary. And institutional crypto custody is in the news. The peer-to-peer systems that I have looked at had people offering crypto at a high prices. But the central business just waits for confirmation of a financial transaction received by the seller and doesn't handle the banking. The central business does probably handle its own crypto custody. And so the business is partially based on private messaging between peers. Another crypto business opportunity is staking whereby someone who FULLY stakes can run a computer as a validator of proof-of-stake blockchains. The problem is that the biggest stakers have the advantage and some of them are very big. Also, partial staking using pools is being shut-down by regulators. And yet another crypto business opportunity are liquidity pools of swap systems whereby someone can deposit two cryptocurrencies into an automated market-maker and earn trading fees. And the largest market-makers have the advantage.