CoinJoin
NCA wants regulation for coin mixers, but the crypto industry is already one step ahead
The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) seeks to regulate the crypto coin mixers under the country’s laws against money laundering. Coin mixing tools are popular in the decentralized world as they maintain the privacy of transactions. These tools often mix several transactions to obscure the origin of a particular transaction. Then the recipient receives the transactions from a mixing “black box” comprised of hundreds of transactions from various wallets. While privacy-focused, these tools often face regulators’ ire as they are also a known way for hackers and criminals to wash their funds. Gary Cathcart, the NCA’s head of financial investigation, claimed that these transaction mixing tools offer a layer of anonymity to criminals that can be use...
No crypto for criminals: Coinjoin BTC mixing tool to block illicit transactions
CoinJoin, a popular Bitcoin (BTC) mixing tool, will block transactions associated or flagged as illegal. The announcement came from the official Wasabi Wallet Twitter account, of which Coinjoin is a part. The zkSNACKs coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coinjoins. pic.twitter.com/X3kBuQwieO — Wasabi Wallet (@wasabiwallet) March 13, 2022 The official announcement noted that CoinJoin services would start blocking certain unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) from registering with CoinJoin using the zkSNACKs coordinator. A zkSNACKs coordinator is a virtual machine used to mix the origin of the transitions. Privacy-focused mixing tools are primarily used to obscure the origin of the transactions and are often seen as a medium to wash illicit funds. However, as block...
