Yesterday, the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), the largest agency of the US Department of the Treasury, officially announced the names of the winners of the prize offered in order to find a system to track data on transactions taking place on the Monero (XMR) blockchain and Lightning Network (LN).
These are interesting names because there is a company from Texas, Integra FEC, but also Chainalysis, a crypto company that has been operating in the sector for a long time and that has devised various tools that deal with the analysis of data coming from different blockchains.
According to the rumours, 22 applications were submitted but only these 2 companies prevailed, devising solutions to achieve what was requested by the IRS.
Both are taking home a sum of $625,000 and will continue to work with the agency to put the proposed solutions into practice.
This means that there may be a way to track transactions on this blockchain and the layer 2, which at that point may no longer be very secure.
Chainalysis ready to track Monero and Lightning Network
As far as Chainalysis is concerned, it has become a real reference point for its tracking methods and has already been integrated by Tether for AML (Anti Money Laundering), by Algorand to track all activities on this blockchain, and also by Fireblocks that will use the KYT (Know Your Transaction) system to identify transactions in real time.
In fact, with these tools, an attempt is made to put a brake on all those criminals who use crypto to launder money, but also and above all to track the various thefts that take place in this sector, not least the one related to the hack against KuCoin.
The latest analysis has shown that the value of tokens stolen from this CEX has exceeded 200 million, and criminals have used Uniswap to liquidate them, thus a decentralized exchange (DEX) that allows tokens to be swapped and traded without KYC.
So, if on the one hand, it could be possible to avoid further hacks and crimes, on the other, it could be possible to trace all the transactions so that anonymous blockchains would no longer have it easy.
