Europol Announcement: Monero Transactions Cannot Be Traced

According to the latest Europol Announcement, the users who choose to cover their transactions can do so by using Monero which only contradicts the previous discoveries that XMR transactions can reveal some of the identities of users as we reported previously in the Monero news.

When it comes to authorities, the transactions on the Monero network are impossible to trace. As per the recent Europol announcement by the Cybercrime Centre, it seems that the detailed research failed to reveal either IP transactions or the coin movements. The details about Monero were shared during a webinar from the Blockchain Alliance where the anonymity of the coins and the details were shared by the expert Jerek Jakubcek who also revealed that Europol was tracking the development of anonymous coins as Jacubcek explained:

‘’Since the suspect used a combination of Tor and [Monero], we could not trace the funds. We could not trace the IP-addresses. Which means, we hit the end of the road. Whatever happened on the Bitcoin blockchain was visible and that’s why we were able to get reasonably far.’’

The high interest in Monero only outlines the fact that the European authorities are trying to curb the usage of anonymity coins. Over the past year, Europol cracked down on Bestmixer which is one of the leading Bitcoin mixing services but despite that, the coin mixing BTC can reveal something about the origins of the transactions. The combination of an anonymity coin and the Tor browser seems to be the top choice to mask all of the traces. The Monero protocol held a recent bug that might have exposed the IP-addresses previously but now there are more approaches to cover all of the data.

The anonymous usage is only possible with peer-to-peer transactions and Exchanges that still carry Monero still require incoming transactions that are de-veiled and linked to an accounting identity and usually a verified real-world identity. After withdrawing monero however, the coins can be obscured and the origin is lost. Some of the other blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin offer a transparent path to trace all of the transactions but once the funds enter the blockchain the trail ends.