Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg

The trillion-dollar infrastructure funding bill signed by President Joe Biden in November 2021 included two provisions—designed, in theory, to help pay for the bill’s spending—that passed despite their radioactive unpopularity in the cryptocurrency world. These new rules require vaguely defined cryptocurrency “brokers”—or, for that matter, any cryptocurrency business doing a transaction worth more than $10,000—to report the Social Security number of the person on the other side of the transaction to the IRS. “It basically makes it effectively impossible to transact anonymously,” says Marta Belcher, a cryptocurrency-focused attorney and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s a total disaster for civil liberties.”[*] Then in March of 2022, President Biden signed an executive order on “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets” that also—with little specificity—called for new rules to prevent the use of cryptocurrency for illicit purposes, from human trafficking to terrorism. At the same time, U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the partisan aisle issued public warnings that cryptocurrency could be used to evade the strict new sanctions Western governments imposed on Russia in response to its Ukraine invasion. If that renewed focus on regulating digital money continues to sharpen, Chainalysis may soon be far from the biggest problem for any American seeking to use cryptocurrency anonymously.