Earlier this week, an article in the Finnish publication MTV Uutiset claimed that Finland's National Bureau of Investigation (KRP) had succeeded in tracking transactions using cryptography. Monero.
However, a former member of the MAGIC Monero Fund Committee told Decrypt that it is unlikely that Monero itself is affected. Silla Brimmer said investigators were able to trace some transactions due to faulty operational security on the part of users rather than Monero itself being compromised.
“If you're not careful about the security of your operation and keep switching between Bitcoin and Monero, you might leak some information,” she told Decrypt. “Regulators can use this slippage to claim they can monitor Monero.”
Brimmer, a blockchain consultant and co-founder of the Open Economy Initiative, added, “Monero is very strong at protecting transaction details, but it can't save you from slipping in your own security practices.”
KRP has been looking into transactions made to addresses related to the 2018 data breach and exploitation of Finnish psychology provider Vastamo. In the year After stealing data from the company twice in 2020, hackers threatened to release patients' personal data unless the company paid them. Investigators sent 0.1 BTC to the specified address and have since been investigating how the wallet transferred the money in Bitcoin and Monero.
That's what prompted KRP to say it wanted to know how to track XMR transactions, although the firm didn't want to get specifics on how they did it.
Where all parts report further investigation [NBI] The investigation methods are encrypted, the head of the investigation, Marco Leposson, told MTV UTSET in an article translated, adding that the agency did not want to reveal anything about the analysis of Monero traffic.
In the year Brimmer, who was elected to the MAGIC Monero fund in 2022, seems unfazed by the claims of the Finnish authorities. Despite being banned by many exchanges, XMR is far and away the largest privacy coin with a market cap of $2.8 billion. As of Friday morning, according to CoinGecko data, it was trading at $158.22—up 1% in the past 24 hours.
However, it is one of the main projects to make money.
Bittrex, BitBay and Huobi have all canceled Monero to appease regulators who say they are trying to crack down on money laundering. And in 2021, US-based Kraken canceled Monero so its UK customers would comply with the country's AML regulations. Monero is now one of several privacy coins at risk of delisting from Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume.
In a blog post earlier this year, Binance said Monero, Zcash and other privacy coins “have particularly high volatility and risks compared to other listed tokens” and are “at risk of no longer meeting our listing requirements.”
Edited by Stephen's Grave.
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