Money Laundering

Crypto exchange Kraken has announced the delisting of Monero in the European Economic Area to maintain compliance with EU regulations.

An academic paper titled: "Reconciliation of Anti-Money Laundering Instruments and European Data Protection Requirements in Permissionless Blockchain Spaces" published in the Journal of Cybersecurity suggests that governments should target cryptocurrencies — especially privacy preserving chains — to combat money laundering.

The author of the paper outlined several methods of undermining trust in permissionless blockchains including 51% attacks, price suppression, and Sybil attacks — a type of malicious activity in which a single user creates multiple accounts to manipulate a network. The author asserted:

However, the paper also argued that these methods should only be used as a "last resort" to combat money laundering after other policy initiatives such as blacklisting wallet addresses, flagging transactions, sanctions, and other regulations have been exhausted.

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