Cryptocurrency mixing service Bitcoin Blender has reportedly willingly shut down after issuing a short notice asking its users to withdraw their funds, tech news outlet BleepingComputer reports on May 30. Per the report, the message describing the service that appeared on the homepage of the website present both on the Tor network (often referred to as the darknet, dark web or deep web) and on clearnet before it shut down was the following: “We are a hidden service that mixes your bitcoins to remove the link between you and your transactions. This adds an essential layer of anonymity to your …

On May 22, 2019, cryptocurrency mixers (also called tumblers) were front and center on the news cycle, following reports of European authorities shutting down one such service. Law enforcement officials involved said the action was necessitated by reports on Bestmixer.io — i.e., the platform in question that was being used to funnel dirty money via cryptocurrencies. Stakeholders in the crypto industry decried the action, calling it a gross overreach by government agents. They also declared that it set a dangerous precedent, one that could be inimical to cryptography as a whole. In the wake of the shutdown, Vitalik Buterin, the …

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed creating an on-chain smart contract-based ether mixer in a note on collaborative development platform HackMD on May 24. In his note, Buterin argues that the Ethereum ecosystem needs more privacy, and points out that the default behavior is to do everything through a single account, allowing for all of the user’s activities to be linked to each other. Furthermore, he notes that simply spreading the ether across multiple addresses is not a solution, since the transactions sending ETH to those wallets connect them. Buterin also linked to a Twitter thread where it has …

Dutch, Luxembourg authorities and Europol have shut down one of the three largest cryptocurrency tumblers, Europol reported on May 22. A cryptocurrency tumbler, also known as a cryptocurrency mixing service, is an anonymity tool that claims to transform transactions of non-private coins to private ones by mixing crypto funds with others, which makes it difficult to track the funds’ original source. According to the report, the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) has now seized six servers of major crypto tumbler Bestmixer.io, which had a reported turnover of at least $200 million since its launch in May 2018. The …

United States-based blockchain and software development firm Orchid Labs has raised another $7 million within its latest private offering, according to a blog post published on May 7. Following the new raise, Orchid now has secured $43 million out of targeted funding of around $125 million, as the firm specified in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in April 2018. In the filing, Orchid revealed that the company raised $36.1 million via a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens by that time. Founded in 2017, Orchid is developing an open-source decentralized and surveillance-free internet protocol intending to …

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to account for the lion’s share of crypto-denominated ransomware payments, according to Coveware’s Q1 2019 Global Ransomware Marketplace report, published on April 15. The report — reportedly based upon aggregated ransomware data from cases tackled by Coveware’s Incident Response Team — indicates that in Q1 2019 the ransomware landscape saw a sharp increase in the average ransom demanded by threat actors. The average sum — demanded in exchange for the ostensible delivery of a decryptor tool that can help victims recover data after a ransomware attack — rose 89% from a median $6,733 in Q4 2018 to …

Dutch global banking and financial services corporation ING introduced its new cryptographic blockchain development called Bulletproofs, according to an announcement on Feb. 7 Bulletproofs represents an extended technology for ING’s previous blockchain privacy-focused developments such as zero-knowledge range proof (ZKRP) and zero-knowledge set membership (ZKSM). ING bank first launched ZKRP in November 2017, enabling market participants to maintain anonymity in a transaction while still confirming its accuracy. For instance, the tool allowed a mortgage applicant to prove their salary within a certain range without revealing the exact figure. As an improved version of ZKRP, ZKSM was released in October 2018, …

A cryptocurrency exchange says it is prioritizing the privacy of its users — eliminating the “tedious” registration steps imposed by other websites. BitConvert argues that some rival platforms ask for too many personal details when they are bringing new users on board and says this can make consumers uncomfortable when they are in pursuit of absolute anonymity. The company also claims such excessive registration procedures actively undermine the purpose of coins that were designed to deliver privacy. According to BitConvert, its users have the ability to “instantly exchange coins” without being required to register an account with the website. At …

A 33-year old Danish man has been sentenced to four years and three months in jail for laundering over $450,000 in Bitcoin (BTC), tech news agency The Next Web reports April 8. Citing a press release from Danish Police, the report says that the criminal pleaded guilty to laundering 3 million Danish kroner that came from criminal activity. The crypto launderer reportedly exchanged the dirty money in Bitcoin and sent the funds to his accomplices via accounts of unspecified foreign crypto exchanges. Danish police reportedly detected the intruder through an investigation of card abuse after they found that one of …

XMR.to — a service that allows users to increase the privacy of their Bitcoin (BTC) transactions by using Monero (XMR) as an intermediary currency — has announced it will not be serving United States-based clients for the time being. The news was revealed in a post from a member of the site’s core team to a Reddit thread on March 30. The brief statement gives little information, indicating only that: "XMR.to will for the time being not be serving customers in the US. We are working with our legal team to understand the best way forward. This policy will come …

Leading Ethereum (ETH) browser extension Metamask reportedly broadcasts ETH addresses to all websites a user visits in its default settings, a GitHub issue submitted on March 20 states. Metamask is a browser extension featured in the Brave browser — compatible with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera — that enables its users to interact with Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps). According to the aforementioned GitHub issue, Metamask broadcasts its users’ ETH address to all the websites visited in its default settings, with the post specifying that the ETH addresses are shown in data objects contained in message broadcasts as opposed to …

On March 9, Monero (XMR) network was successfully upgraded via a hard fork. The new code curbed application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)-powered mining with a new proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm. Additionally, new dynamic block size algorithm and improved privacy — which is considered to be Monero’s key feature — were introduced. Once the ASIC miners were taken out of the equation, the network’s hash rate dropped over 80 percent — which, however, might be positive for the cryptocurrency in the long term. Anonymity above all: Monero’s main principle Monero is a privacy coin, meaning that it is anonymous and untraceable by design. …