ShapeShift Quietly Delisted Monero From Its Trading Platform

ShapeShift quietly delisted Monero from its trading platform as US government agencies started taking aim at the privacy coin. Users of the privacy coin have now one less place to purchase it as we are reading more in the latest Monero news.

And is not just Monero, Dash also got delisted from Shapeshift. Monero is the world’s most-popular privacy coin while Dash has optional privacy features. The US Government agencies hired blockchain firms to trace XMR transactions so maybe this was a part of the decision of the exchange to delist the prominent privacy coin. ShapeShift spokesperson said that Shapeshift quitely delisted Dash, Bitcoin Cash as competitors with optional anonymity features.

Unlike standard crypto exchanges, ShapeShift is a portal for purchasing, selling, and trading crypto assets while maintaining the ownership of one’s private keys. Founded in Switzerland, the most popular crypto-friendly EU state, Shapeshift has a history of getting in the way of governmental intrusions. For example, it ceased offering services in New York State in 2015 rather than comply with the state regulators mandating that the digital currency companies record certain user details. It later pulled services from Washington state because of similar regulations.

While the exchange didn’t give in to regulators in 2018 as it started to comply with know your customer rules, the privacy coins would no matter what seem to be a good fit philosophically for the platform. Monero which trades by the initials XMR is the biggest privacy coin by market cap that is worth more than $2 billion. The transactions on the blockchain are obscured via a coin mixing process which makes it difficult for others to see wallet addresses of the sender and recipient and even the amount. This is the opposite of what Bitcoin does as it allows anyone to view these transactions.

Monero’s built-in privacy makes a few elements in the US government uncomfortable because XMR is a preferred coin of the hackers. The Department of Homeland Security contracted the blockchain forensics company CipherTrace to create a way to trace the transactions. CEO Dave Jevans said that his company was able to develop a probabilistic approach to determine the addresses involved in transactions. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said:

 “A lot of it is behind-the-scenes conversations where [regulators] are kind of saying: ‘We very much don’t think you should do this. And then we have the conversation: ‘Well, are you telling us that you don’t like it, or are you telling us that you are going to sue us if we do it?’”