Google Lifts Three Year Old Ban On Digital Currency Advertisements

In an astonishing move on Wednesday, search engine giant Google revoked an approximately 3-year-old policy prohibiting digital asset exchanges from using its advertisement services.

A policy update on the search engine’s support page reads,

“Beginning August 3, advertisers offering Cryptocurrency Exchanges and Wallets targeting the United States may advertise those products and services when they meet the following requirements and are certified by Google.”

Crypto exchanges need to pass a couple of requirements for showing the advertisements. They need to be either registered with “FinCEN as a Money Services Business and with at least one state as a money transmitter” or “a federal or state chartered bank entity,” probably opening the door to advertisements from numerous crypto services.

The policies of Google around virtual currency advertisements have often been inconsistent, and majority of the times, critics have denounced them as unfair. All through 2018, the tech behemoth flip-flopped on a crypto exchange advertisement prohibition. At one point, the company had blacklisted the word “Ethereum” in ads, and notwithstanding the uncompromising policies, still sometimes permitted fraudulent projects to slip through.

The latest ad policy signifies that virtual currency enthusiasts may soon be bombarded with ads. Binance.US and FTX are presently contending with each other to carve out stateside market share. Earlier in 2021, it was declared that FTX purchased the naming rights to the home of the National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat until 2040, which will shortly be the FTX Arena.