The NCA calls for the regulation of crypto mixers that are used in the swirling of criminal money

The British National Crime Agency has called for the regulation of sophisticated mixed technologies to be used by criminals to avoid discovery if money is washed by cryptocurrencies.

so-called "decentralized crypto mixers", also known as coin join, can be used to disguise transactions that are otherwise understandable on blockchains, publicly visible digital main books in which the transmission of cryptocurrencies are recorded.

The open source software requires that several parties sign a digital contract that enables coins from different wallets and to distribute them-which makes it difficult to understand where the money comes from.

"They can be used to provide a 'layering' service, raise criminal cash, to disguise its origin and inspection track, similar to a cash business of criminals to legitimize cash by the banking system," Gary Cathcart, Head of Financial Department of the National Crime Agency towards Financial Times.

The warning comes, since authorities worldwide increasingly has become the criminal use of cryptocurrency because the new and unregulated sector has gained popularity.

The NCA said that the regulation would force mixers to comply with the money laundering laws with the obligation to carry out customer controls and test paths of currencies that go through the platforms.

This would enable the users' law enforcement agencies to "fraud, which are often serious criminal activities", including ransomware attacks, fraud, state-funded crime and terrorism, added properly, Cathcart added.

According to Elliptic, a group that analyzes cryptocurrency transactions, around 15 percent of all yields from criminal offenses were led by mixers in 2021.

known services include Wasabi Wallet, Samourai Wallet and Helix, whose US founder Larry Dean Harmon owed to allegations of money in August last year.

wasabi was introduced in 2018 and works decentrally with software that everyone can download and use. It is a flagship product of ZKSNACKS made of Gibraltar, which describes itself as a "unfair private". The company charges a fee of 0.003 percent of each transaction to the number of users who mix in every transfer round Wallets - the data protection level increases with a higher number of users.

Proponents of decentralized mixers argue that the public character of the blockchain of a bank is like a bank that shares its credit and its transaction course, which could make users the goal of criminal offenses such as fraud.

elliptic estimates that revenue from crimes worth more than 1 billion USD flowed through Wasabi by pursuing briefs from well -known malicious actors.

In 2020, the EU criminal investigation authority Europol published a report on Wasabi after determining an increase in investigations in connection with the software. It turned out that 30 percent of the bitcoins that ran over the platform came from Dark Web markets over a period of three weeks. Dark-web transactions are estimated to make up only one percent of the total transfers on the wider cryptocurrency market, it said.

bálint Harmat, managing director and founder of ZKSNacks, said that the claims of the NCA, Europol and Elliptic do not correspond to “reality”.

"The alternative, bitcoin without security and fungability, would lead to catastrophic unforeseen consequences," he added. "We are just a team of developers and economists who work hard for a better future."

Due to its decentralized character,

Europol also emphasized as an emerging “top threat” in 2020.

SAMOURAI said that the “vast majority” of the users who use this type of coinjoin software are faithless.

"We agree that the use of centralized mixers who take possession of funds and keep them in possession, check and avoided," added the company in an explanation. "Free and open source software algorithms in which there is no entity that kept funds, but cannot be effectively regulated."

Allison Owen, an analyst who leads the work of the Royal United Services Institute to cryptocurrencies and financial crime, said that blends could be used by governments to avoid sanctions.

"People argue that the blockchain has so much transparency when it comes to monitoring transactions, but they still have to make sure that surveillance takes place," she added.