WoW Token Redemption for Balance Not Functioning on EU Servers - Possible Bug or Undocumented Change

wowhead.com:

With today's weekly reset for the EU servers, players were surprised to see their ability to exchange WoW Tokens to Battle.net balance supposedly removed. This isn't a change announced by Blizzard, so it may be a bug. This change hasn't affected NA/OCE realms yet.

While it is possible this is a bug with the WoWToken system, it is weird that this change is reflected in different places in the game's UI for European players.

Without an official announcement from Blizzard, it is hard to know whether this is a change for the retail WoWToken. This may be a change, as the Wrath Classic WoWToken already behaves this way for every region, being able to be redeemed only for Game Time and not Battle.net Balance.

Possible Reasons

Currency Localization

This might be linked to an email players received recently about their Battlenet currency changing to their local one. However, this is affecting even European players in countries not affected by that future change.

European Union Anti-Money Laundering Directive

Another possibility is that this change is linked to a recent legislation change from the European Union. As part of their Anti-Money Laundering Directive, the European Union added many different directives to regulate what they call «Virtual Currencies», which can be converted to traditional fiat currencies. These regulations were created to combat money laundering with crypto, but are broad enough to extend to gift cards and other virtual currencies that can be converted into real ones, like WoW gold.

It is a complex subject, but you can read more about it in this article, which explain the changes from a cryptocurrency point of view. As European Countries start to draft their legislations to implement this directive, which has its press release here, Blizzard could be subject of strict fines if they don't comply to these changes.