Tornado.Cash, the Ethereum mixing service that earlier this year implemented completely immutable smart contracts, has proposed a governance system powered by its own TORN tokens. According to a Dec. 18 post, the proposal will put stewardship of the protocol in the hands of its community of users. An initial distribution of 10 million TORN will be split between early users and developers, a DAO treasury and anonymity miners over the course of the next five years. Anonymity miners increase the efficiency of the service, and act by providing liquidity in a similar wat to liquidity miners in decentralized finance protocols. …

Waves Enterprise, a major technology company specializing in blockchain-based solutions for businesses and governments, has inked a new partner to streamline its e-voting service. According to a Dec. 16 announcement, Waves Enterprise has signed a memorandum of understanding with blockchain platform Ontology to integrate decentralized identification tools into the Waves Enterprise e-voting system. As part of the partnership, Waves Enterprise and Ontology aim to solve one of the biggest challenges of digital voting — user authentication and identification. The companies specifically plan to apply Ontology’s new decentralized identity solution known as ONT ID. Artem Kalikhov, chief product officer at Waves …

An open-source blockchain protocol called the Secret Network is now offering privacy features for the Ethereum blockchain and 14 ERC-20 tokens. According to a Secret Network blog post, the protocol launched its Secret Ethereum Bridge on the mainnet today, which is designed to allow Ether (ETH) and all ERC-20 token holders to create programmable versions of their assets with privacy features. The Secret Network compared these “secret” tokens to privacy coins like Monero (XMR): "Secret Tokens combine the programmability of ERC-20s with the privacy of coins like Zcash or Monero. Interactions with Secret Token contracts are encrypted, viewable only to …

The United States Federal Trade Commission is making the giants of social media account for their user data practices. On December 11, the FTC published orders for special reports from unnamed social media companies. The commission's stated aim for the reports is: "To compile data concerning the privacy policies, procedures, and practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Service providers, including the method and manner in which they collect, use, store, and disclose information about users and their devices." The initial orders, however, did not include the names of the companies involved. On Monday, the FTC publicized that the orders …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor’s note Last week’s Law Decoded sounded the alarm on threats to self-custodial wallets in the U.S. in particular. While such concerns have continued to take shape, nothing concrete has emerged from the U.S. Treasury, which was at the heart of last week’s conversation. Though I don’t like to recycle themes, it seems a reasonable time to ask the question: What is a crypto wallet as far as a regulator is concerned? While many people access their crypto through custodial solutions …

On Friday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden led a panel discussion as part of a fundraiser for the Tor Project. Joining Snowden were three experts in internet privacy and human rights. The four focused on global protests over the past year, whether they were in Minsk or Portland. Founder of the Library Freedom Project Alison Macrina said that: “What we saw a lot this summer with the BLM protests across the country and the world was [..] law enforcement monitoring social media of activists.” She continued to notes that protestors have gotten cagier to the fact that law enforcement are using …

Oasis Labs, the commercial venture closely related to the Oasis Protocol blockchain, announced a new data privacy project built in collaboration with BMW Group. Announced on Wednesday, the collaboration between the two companies aims to build a new method of accessing personal data that would place clear restrictions on what information can be obtained and how. Oasis refers to this constrained approach as “differential privacy.” It’s an attempt to provide guarantees that aggregated data cannot be manipulated to obtain information on a specific individual. For example, when a dataset includes the average of some value and the number of participants …

Elliptic, a leading firm in blockchain analytics, has found major shifts in recent trends in illicit crypto use. Per the firm's study released Wednesday, the proportion of Bitcoin (BTC) transactions that the firm has linked to criminal activity is way down, certainly relative to its 2012 peak: Tom Robinson, Elliptic's chief scientist, explained to Cointelegraph that this is the result of many trends in crypto. These included heightened exchange compliance and law enforcement activity, as well as the growing force of analytics firms like Elliptic itself. Interestingly, Robinson also said general use has simply exploded: "Other crypto use-cases have exploded …

A newly appointed official in Ukraine has officially declared his cryptocurrency holdings, including a significant amount of privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR). Rostyslav Solod, a 19-year-old deputy of the Kramatorsk regional department and the son of Ukrainian politicians Natalia Korolevska and Yuriy Solod, reported holdings of 185,000 XMR, worth about $24.5 million at publishing time. According to a declaration published on Dec. 2, Solod became the owner of this Monero fortune back in March 2015, when he was 14 years old. At the time, Monero was trading at around $0.50 per coin, meaning that the market price for this acquisition was …

As technology advances, personal data becomes an increasingly relevant topic. Many in the crypto industry hold sovereign finance and data privacy in high regard. Participants' best efforts may be undermined by centralized businesses and regulating bodies, however, according to Cindy Cohn. Cohn is the executive director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a nonprofit entity focused on digital rights. Cohn joined a Web Summit panel on Thursday labeled “Internet: Who owns our data?” Pointing toward the title, she explained: “I actually think that’s the wrong question, I think the question is who controls your data.” She continued: “You already …

Cryptocurrency-related fraud and theft are likely to grow in the post-COVID-19 world, according to a new report by cybersecurity and antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Securelist, Kaspersky’s cyberthreat research arm, published a report on cyberthreats to financial organizations, forecasting some specific types of financial attacks that are likely to surge in 2021. Securelist has predicted that a wave of poverty fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic will inevitably lead to “more people resorting to crime including cybercrime.” That could also mean a rise in crimes related to Bitcoin (BTC). According to Kaspersky’s research arm, Bitcoin is likely to be the most attractive …

When banks finally come to improve their technology experience, they go no deeper than changing the front end. They’ll make a button blue instead of green or create rounded edges on buttons instead of square ones. They think in terms of their interfaces, not the back end. If a bank were to truly innovate its technology, it’d dig deeper into the back end and transform its legacy technical infrastructure, which has been the same for decades. Few today even know how to work on those old programming languages of yesteryear, such as COBOL, so they’re stuck with upgrades that turn …