Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets seen in pyramid schemes, hacks, and other illegal activities have ended up on leading exchanges such as COINBASE and Huobi. Another $ 1.6 billion is in mixers and can be laundered in the same way
In 2020, more than $ 1.4 billion in cryptocurrency related to illegal activities went to leading trading platforms. These include Huobi, Binance, OKEx, Gate.io, BitMEX, Bithumb and Coinbase, according to a report by blockchain research firm PeckShield.
The company clarified that now more than $ 1.6 billion in "dirty" cryptocurrency is in mixers - services for mixing and obfuscating transactions. There is a risk that these funds will also go to trading floors, and this is one of the key problems of the industry. Analysts referred to the coins involved in illegal activities that are associated with:
financial pyramids;
hacking;
fraud;
dark web resources;
illegal online casinos.
“The problem of the inflow of spoiled cryptocurrency to exchanges has not yet come under strict control. Anti-money laundering is considered an important problem, but there are no real measures ... This problem must be addressed now, and not wait for the hammer of the regulator to strike, ”the company said.
Its employees noted that during the year they tracked more than 100 million wallets, of which 53 million are associated with exchanges. The work was carried out with popular cryptocurrencies, including those in the top 5 in terms of capitalization. We are talking about Bitcoin and its fork Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, USDT and XRP tokens.
On July 13, it became known that the US government will begin cooperation with one of the largest exchanges for cryptocurrency trading, Coinbase. The company will provide its solution for monitoring transactions on the blockchain to the US Secret Service, as stated on its official website. The agency reports to the US Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with investigating financial crimes.
