Spain will regulate cryptocurrency advertising, including influencers

Cryptocurrency ads on social networks will be regulated by the CNMV starting next month in Spain.

If you are a user of any social network, it is possible that at some point you have an advertisement for you to invest in cryptocurrencies starring a familiar face. At the moment there has been a lot of laxity, or lack of regulation, with this issue, but in February the situation may change.

The National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) has assessed the context and will require any company that notify with at least 10 days that you are going to carry out a campaign or share an ad that is for cryptocurrencies, including those from influencers.

In the CNMV they qualify as influencer to anyone who has more than 100,000 followers and you must notify if you are going to charge for promoting cryptocurrencies. A practice that is becoming more widespread.

Reuters has published an article about this step to regulate the sector and the main objective is that advertising campaigns also inform users of the risks that exist in this type of investment, an aspect that some people who enter it without previous experience are unaware of.

A similar step had been expected for a long time and it was the CNMV itself that publicly replied to Andrés Iniesta in November when he promoted Binance, a very limited company in countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan.

This measure will also discourage some influencers from surreptitiously advertising by promoting cryptoassets as their opinion, when they are really charging for it. This is dangerous given the impact that some have on their followers, sometimes minors.

Rodrigo Buenaventura, president of the CNMV, has commented on the regulation of influencers that “This is new ground, for us and for them, and there will be moments of friction, but that always happens when you bring rules for something that was not regulated before”, they publish in Financial Times,

In any case, we will soon know in depth the measures of the National Securities Market Commission to understand to what extent the current context can change. Being scheduled for February, it will be a matter of weeks.