Privacy-focused crypto assets use surges by 5 fold over last year: Report

An analysis found that Monero-like crypto-assets use is surging rapidly in illegal activities. 

Crypto adoption surging rapidly because of better use cases, thanks to the decentralized blockchain technology. However, on one side we are using cryptocurrencies in payment systems and also for funds investment purposes but besides these things, some side-effects can be seen because of the involvement of bad actors, which are using cryptocurrencies in illegal activities. 

Recently CipherTrace, a blockchain analytics firm, published its report on the increasing use of privacy-focused crypto assets in ransomware attacks or illegal activities.

According to the released report, Monero-like crypto assets’ use surged by around 500% from 2021 to 2022, which are associated with illicit activities to collect funding.

A similar kind of report was also published by crypto analytic platform Chainalysis and noted that anonymous transactions provider cryptocurrencies use surpassed $600 million within the last year. 

Latest Research noted that the majority of the ransomware attackers asked for payment in MXR( Monero) and there were only 10-20% of attackers who were asking for Bitcoin or MXR.

“Higher prices for BTC are most likely seen by the ransomware actors as a premium for dealing with the increased risk in using an easily traceable cryptocurrency like BTC.”

The research noted that Bitcoin is better because of its high prices but opposite of that it is responsible to create privacy issues for the attackers because Bitcoin is a highly traceable digital currency.

Monero is a highly privacy-focused crypto asset. Here Monero is not only a digital currency but also it provides highly strict privacy to users because it uses mixers, ring signatures, and stealth addresses to make the transactions anonymous for sender and receiver. This reason is a big cause for the bad actors to choose this coin.

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