on the crypto
According to an excerpt from research titled “2021 Crypto Crime Report” by blockchain research firm Chainalysis, released on Monday, online marketplaces that supply illegal goods such as drugs and fake IDs received a record amount of cryptocurrency in 2020, equal to 1,7, $ XNUMX billion.
Russia, the USA, Ukraine and China were the main areas of money trafficking to these platforms. Darknet markets receive most of the money via peer-to-peer crypto-markets and centralized exchanges, says Chainalysis. In 2020, the use of centralized exchanges has further increased, as have mixing services, which make it possible to hide the parts of a cryptocurrency transaction.
The dark drug market
The report lists 10 countries whose citizens interact most actively with dark markets: Russia, the United States, Ukraine, China, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Vietnam, Turkey, India and Germany. Together, these nations spent an estimated $ 538 million on illegal markets in 2020, while revenue from the same markets totaled $ 403 million, Chainalysis said.
The Russians sent around $ 169 million to various darknet markets and received $ 119 million from those sites. Americans are second, with $ 115 million sent and $ 64 million received. In third place, the Ukrainians sent $ 47 million and received $ 52 million.
“In general, the drug is grown or produced in Latin America and Asia and consumed in North America and northern and western Europe,” the report reads. “Darknet vendors and administrators typically launder funds through cryptocurrency services - often over-the-counter (OTC) brokers - in China or Eastern Europe. We can see some of this activity in the blockchain data associated with darknet market transactions. "
Hydra
The largest market in the industry by far is Hydra, a Russian-language drug market that pocketed 75 percent of the entire global dark market revenue, Chainalysis said. Hydra has been primarily responsible for the rapid growth of the dark market globally over the past year, while the revenue of the other markets has not changed significantly between 2019 and 2020.
In December 2019, Hydra announced that it would expand to other regions of the world and that it would organize a $ 146 million token sale. However, the plan was put on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. According to Bitfury's data company Crystal Blockchain, currently bitcoin addresses (buy Bitcoins) of Hydra hold more than 521 BTC, worth over $ 18 million. Since 2011, Hydra has sent and received more than 439.000 BTC ($ 15,2 billion).
The data limit
Chainalysis has been studying various aspects of the geography of cryptocurrency use for several years, although the company admits that locating digital assets around the world is a difficult task with several limitations. For this type of analysis, Chainalysis examines data such as web traffic on particular services via SimilarWeb, the time zones in which transactions take place, the fiat currencies involved, the languages and the location of the service headquarters.
