Where's your money? Asset tracking became the first focus of the year of the piglet

On February 12th Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, announced that it had raised $30m ina series B funding led by Accel. Last April, Chainalysis completed A $16 million series A round of funding.

As the privacy technology of major cryptocurrencies is upgraded, the power of anti-privacy technology is also growing.Chainalysis, founded in 2014, is an anti-privacy analysis firm that provides digital cryptocurrency analysis software to hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges, international law enforcement agencies and others to help them comply with compliance requirements, assess risks and identify illicit activity.

Such as Chainalysis provide KYC currency Ann and AML technical support, to provide the technical support to crack down on the crime of digital currency europol and survey tools, surveyed Mt. The bigger the bankruptcy and claimed to find the lost COINS address, work with multiple financial intelligence agency track how people through digital encryption currency transfer the money to the world. Chainalysis's analysis and industry reports are cited in several BlockBeats articles.

Chainalysis's anti-privacy business

The round was led by venture capital firm Accel, along with Benchmark, which led Chainalysis's $16 million a-round in April. Accel is an established silicon valley venture capital firm that has invested in companies including Circle, Oasis Labs, Discord, Facebook, Lyft, dji innovation, Ola, and BitTorrent.

Accel, a venture capital firm, sees explosive growth for digital cryptocurrencies in the future, but they are still in the early stages of development and adoption.The blockchain industry will be subject to stricter and more detailed regulation in the future, and KYC and AML will become the mainstream trend. Digital cryptocurrency investigations, compliance solutions, identifying illegal activities are a very promising business.

Chainalysis company using depth analysis and machine learning technology, with more than 100 financial and regulatory agencies to make regulators, the compliance department, consulting and financial intelligence (FIU) can gain insight, understanding how and why people transfer the money through digital encryption currency network to global, help law enforcement agencies to track illegal encrypted transaction, support financial institutions to comply with anti-money laundering rules.

Michael Gronager, CEO and co-founder of Chainalysis, said that despite the secular cryptocurrency bear market, investors are still willing to put money into the cryptocurrency industry and are willing to make long-term investments in the foundations of the emerging cryptocurrency ecosystem.heThe hope is to re-establish trust between governments, financial institutions, cryptocurrency companies and consumers as a lubricant for industry security and prosperity.

"Pollution analysis" or "compliance lubricant"?

Concerns have also been raised about the development of anti-privacy technologies.

In February, the fifth satoshi nakamoto round table pointed out thatBlockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis track blockchain funding and perform "pollution analyses" on it, telling services how likely it is that the funding source is "illegal."

This exacerbates the lack of privacy in cryptocurrency networks and creates one of the biggest problems, which is that it undermines interchangeability. This opens the door to corporate espionage in cryptocurrency, making it easier for the tech-savvy to see the balance and value of a hot and cold wallet by depositing small COINS into a competitor's address and then watching its UTXO move!

By tracking the number of jumps in UTXO history, you can monitor how much money a user holds and how many transactions they make

In addition, the analysis company's probability-based guesses may lead to many innocent users getting caught in the algorithm's dragnet. The analytics tools they provide have led to many bitcoin users being pulled out of various services because they are considered risky customers. Therefore, data analysis companies should keep their distance from government regulators,"Don't be evil" is a stronger position than "don't be evil" because it's not just about your intentions.

One particularly interesting point made at the conference was that no one has been prosecuted for blockchain analysis, since it does not have enough evidence for criminal charges. Just like people who commit crimes because of "over the wall", but never hear those who "build walls" are also guilty. It is these research and analysis companies that have made it possible for many privacy-conscious users to be flagged as suspicious by developing tools to better understand people's digital cryptocurrency assets.

More and more projects will improve privacy performance

In consensus's prediction of blockchain 2019, ConsenSys believes that global regulation will evolve, the blockchain industry will be subject to stricter and more detailed regulation in the future, and KYC and AML will become mainstream trends. This is also true of Chainalysis, a firm backed by investors such as Accel.

In contrast,Privacy protection will become an important consideration in the design of blockchain projects, and more and more projects will improve the privacy performance.Its primary goal is to help users blur their money holdings and their transaction records, preventing their wallet activity from being tracked.

There are two directions. First, the pure privacy coin projects will continue to develop, such as the existing Monero and Dash, as well as Beam and Grin, which were hot at the beginning of this year. There will definitely be new privacy coin projects in the future.

Another direction is for projects to start adding and improving privacy performance. For example, the Coinjoin design makes BTC and BCH transactions more private and resistant to censorship.

This is the mixing of multiple transactions, the merging of a single set of anonymous transactions, and thenRepeated hybrid rounds create a larger anonymous set that is converted into multiple equivalent outputs.The technology makes it difficult for blockchain analytics companies to identify each consumer.

Coinjoin BTC trading

But no matter which direction, this year the industry has returned to the old topic of "privacy + technology", where the coin came from and where it went, also became the first focus of the year of the pig.

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