The cryptocurrency news today show that one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase wants to sell its blockchain analytics services to the DEA and the IRS to identify its users.
Public documents emerging show that the San Francisco firm stands to make as much as $250,000 from the DEA for its “identity attribution” software. The exchange has faced criticism in the past for its link to the controversial surveillance tech company Hacking Team.
However, this does not change the fact that Coinbase wants to reveal identity of its users to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which are planning to buy licenses for the cloud-based software named Coinbase Analytics.
According to one prospective DEA contract, the software by Coinbase will provide “identity attribution” for crypto addresses both domestically and internationally. The documents were released to the public on May 18 and April 7, respectively – and The Block was first to report the news.
Coinbase wants to sell the information of its users and would not comment directly on the federal contracts. However, rumors from circles the Coinbase news show that the San Francisco company is doing this in order to support compliance and investigation purposes.
Earlier this year, Coinbase stressed that the Coinbase blockchain analytics data “does not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, regardless of whether or not they use Coinbase.” They also noted that it uses the product internally for compliance and global investigations.
The rumors show that the contract states that “this is the least expensive tool on the market and has the most features for the money.” In that manner, Coinbase wants to sell the tool and could make anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 on the deal, as details in the contract show.
Moreover, the IRS contract reads that the criminal investigation cyber unit “requires a software tool that can assist in the tracing of various types of cryptocurrency, not just Bitcoin” to support its law enforcement investigative mission.
“Coinbase Analytics also provides some enhanced law enforcement sensitive capabilities that are not currently found in other tools on the market,” is also written.
Anyways, this is a big thing in the Coinbase news now and something that may change a lot of things for users on the exchange.
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