Category: 4. Your crypto footprint

Open permissionless blockchains aren’t, however, the only show in town. Governments are starting to recognise that some of the elements of transparency provided by blockchains might actually enable them to exert more control over central bank issued money. This is leading to the rapid development of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). No surprises that some…

Privacy coins are the crypto industries response to blockchain analysis, and government attempts at regulation. Those who promote them see transparency as a threat to privacy and security. Privacy coins are designed to give users complete anonymity when conducting transactions.  Unlike with BTC or ETH, these cryptocurrencies use stealth addresses and ring signatures to hide…

Crypto analytics providers help bridge the gap between the crypto industry and regulatory bodies. Naturally, it makes sense to consider crypto as a challenge to regulatory and tax authorities due to the permissionless nature of blockchains.  Some countries have certainly taken this view, with nations such as China, Russia and india at various time  threatening…

Blockchain analysis companies apply data science techniques to publicly available blockchain data. They do this to discover useful information about transactions; the process involves identifying, clustering and modelling data. This data can then be visually represented and access sold in commercial packages using a familiar SaaS (software as a service) model.  The most obvious commercial…

Firstly, it is crucial to understand that the absence of personal information on blockchain transactions does not result in anonymity. For example, Bitcoin transactions move funds between addresses which are alphanumeric strings (containing no personal information) simply pointing to a location on the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. These addresses are recorded on-chain and are therefore visible…

In a previous article, we explored the anatomy of a bitcoin transaction and how easily the flow of funds can be accessed and analysed.  Now we are going to put this information into context. It is essential to understand that the absence of personal information doesn’t make users invisible. We can begin to explain the big business…

What you’ll learn The tension between transparency & privacy How crypto anonymity intersects with you real world identity How blockchain analytics is big business Part of blockchains value is that they are permissionless. There is no central authority needed to facilitate and authorise transactions – instead it is the technology itself and its consensus mechanism…