As a seasoned analyst with over two decades of experience in the financial industry, I find the recent surge in private Bitcoin transactions through CoinJoin intriguing. My personal journey has taken me through the dot-com bubble, the 2008 global financial crisis, and now into the digital age, witnessing firsthand the evolution of finance and technology.
Since 2022, the number of private Bitcoin transactions facilitated by the CoinJoin method has significantly increased threefold, largely due to massive Bitcoin hoarders speeding up their Bitcoin acquisitions, as indicated by CryptoQuant.
According to CryptoQuant’s Ki Young Ju, most Bitcoin addresses belonging to ‘whales’ are primarily associated with Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds, MicroStrategy, and custodial wallets. He further mentioned that these whales often employ privacy transactions to move their funds to new institutional investors, as explained in a December 26 blog post.
A method of grouping together inputs and outputs from multiple users in a way that makes it difficult to determine the ownership of an unredeemed transaction output, is known as CoinJoin transactions.
Ju clarified that the notion suggesting CoinJoin transactions are primarily utilized by hackers to wash away ill-gotten gains is misleading. This is because Chainalysis’ reported $2.2 billion in losses in 2024 represents a mere 0.5% of Bitcoin’s total $377 billion in realized capital inflows for that same year.
Despite publicly-traded companies revealing their Bitcoin possessions, it’s still unknown who owns approximately 420,000 Bitcoins, valued at more than $40 billion, as pointed out by Young Ju.
“Who are these whales?” Young Ju asked.
Some people discussing the post raised questions about whether a country could secretly amass Bitcoin holdings, and others hypothesized that this might be a nation attempting to minimize potential sanctions by acquiring digital currency.
Russia recently passed legislation authorizing foreign trade in Bitcoin and other crypto assets.
CoinJoin’s potential for misuse has captured the attention of law enforcement around the world, including United States authorities, who arrested the founders of privacy-focused Bitcoin non-custodial service Samourai Wallet and seized its website in April.
Currently, the U.S. Department of Justice stated that Samourai’s CoinJoin function was involved in approximately $2 billion worth of illicit transactions and aided over $100 million in money laundering from underground markets like Silk Road and Hydra Market on the dark web.
In August 2022, Dutch officials arrested Alexey Pertsev, inventor of the cryptocurrency blending tool Tornado Cash, after he was convicted of money laundering in May 2024.
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2024-12-27 04:27