Per its Wednesday additions to its list of sanctioned individuals, the United States Treasury Department is targeting Monero (XMR) addresses. Russian nationals Dmitriy Karasavidi and Danil Potekhin have become the newest names on the specially designated nationals list. According to the Treasury’s announcement on the subject, the two engineered an elaborate phishing campaign targeting U.S. citizens in 2017 and 2018. Both parties had a number of cryptocurrency addresses including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), as well as Zcash (ZEC) and Litecoin (LTC). Surprisingly, Karasavidi’s information includes a Monero address: 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320. Given Monero's famous built-in privacy features, this is a huge …

Lately, the controversial topic of censorship on Big Tech platforms reached a turning point when U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign account was banned on both Twitter and Facebook for “spreading coronavirus misinformation.” The conversation over who has control over what kinds of information that get out to what kinds of audiences is not new. As we move toward Web 3.0, many believe this future version of the internet will be a more decentralized, immutable and censorship-resistant version of the web. The decentralized data storage solution InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS, is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that is designed to make …

Anti-establishment and counter-government sentiments fuelled the early days of crypto. More than a decade later, crypto is slowly moving away from its wild-west early days and into a more organized system that traditional financial institutions are reluctantly adopting. Crypto has also managed to attract the no less reluctant attention of various regulators. With reactions ranging from a complete ban on crypto transactions to making authorities question the overall role of regulation, cryptocurrencies have wreaked havoc on policymaking everywhere. So far, regulators have mostly focused their attention on positioning digital assets within existing financial regulations. However, experts in other areas of …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor’s note One of the most persistent myths about Bitcoin is its supposed anonymity. More properly termed pseudonymity, BTC wallets are permanently tied to their public keys. Most of you know that. But it took government investigators years of trying to corral Bitcoin transactions on dark web marketplaces like the Silk Road to figure that out. Now, however, blockchain analysis is a growing industry, catering to a range of clients including many of the most shadowy of government agencies. This was …

The United States Internal Revenue Service has offered a bounty of up to $625,000 to anyone who can break purportedly untraceable privacy coins such as Monero (XMR) as well as trace transactions on Bitcoin’s (BTC) Lightning Network. The official proposal, published last week, says the IRS will accept submissions in the form of working prototypes until Sept. 16. If accepted, applicants will receive an initial payment of $500,000. This grant will allow applicants to develop their prototype into a working concept over the next eight months. Once the pilot test is completed and approved by the government, a further $125,000 …

A new enterprise-focused blockchain is trying to carve a spot in this competitive market by focusing on an integrated digital identity system. Called Concordium, the blockchain is among the first to use identity proofs as an integral part of its protocol. Cointelegraph spoke with Concordium’s chief marketing officer, Beni Issembert, to learn more about this system. Issembert said that “the question of identity is what we thought was missing in the whole discussion when it comes to blockchain enterprise.” At first glance, the blockchain is set up in a similar way to any other, where the hashes representing wallet accounts …

The Dash platform will be introducing protocol versioning and other new features in its latest update. Dash announced its fourth update over the weekend. The platform normally releases new functionalities every six weeks, so the next update is expected between October 6 and 20. Dash said it is adding versions of its protocol to make it easier for developers to begin transitioning to a testnet and mainnet. Previously, developers needed to wipe data on Evonet and update their platform software with each new release. The company said: “While this approach is fine for early testing, it is not appropriate for …

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, is calling out Coinbase for its lack of transparency. At the same time, the group pointed to Coinbase's rival exchange, Kraken, as an example of responsible behavior. The EFF was founded in 1990 with the goal of promoting internet civil liberties. In today’s post, the EFF said that it has growing concerns about payment processors being forced to turn over user information to the law enforcement, while the public has no mechanisms available to audit those requests: “That’s why we are calling on Coinbase — one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the country …

In the final decision on a criminal case that began a decade ago, an appellate court has said that the National Security Agency’s phone data collection practices were in fact illegal. They did, however, uphold the convictions in the case. According to the 9th Circuit Court’s Sept. 2 opinion in USA v. Moalin: We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans. The court continued to attack the program, writing that the government’s case neglects that “the collection of …

Imagine if it were possible for your identity to be available at any time, where third parties could only access it with your consent. The discourse that everyone has the right to own their digital identity has been gaining momentum around the world. And the path to this is the development of “decentralized digital identity” solutions. What is a self-sovereign identity? Here, it is important to clarify that according to the concept of self-sovereign digital identity, owners (holders) of the digital identity are responsible for the control and management of their data. And that not only includes basic personal data …

The overwhelming majority of crypto transactions do not include privacy tokens, with most traders choosing to move funds transparently rather than privately. According to crypto analytics firm Coin Metrics’ Sept. 1 State of the Network report, the combined daily transactions of three privacy coins, Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), and Grin (GRIN), equated to only 6% that of Bitcoin (BTC), despite the coins offering substantially more privacy. “User apathy towards privacy is probably the biggest shortcoming of the current anonymous transactions systems,” the report stated. “Despite great technological advancements in crypto-currency privacy, uptake of privacy features and assets has been slow.” …

The Electric Coin Co., or ECC, the entity responsible for the advancement of privacy coin Zcash (ZEC), unveiled new code for the blockchain and crypto community. The company opened its Halo 2 source code — "an updated, more efficient version of ECC’s recursive proof composition that eliminates the need for a trusted setup in Zcash," said a Sept. 1 blog post from the ECC. "It may also advance a promising scalability solution for Zcash and other blockchains," the post added, noting the Halo structure adds speed, among other things. Initiating a private network with Zcash utilizing Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument …