Many Bitcoin holders resort to mixers for privacy reasons, while Darknet market users more often send cryptocurrency directly from the wallets of stock exchanges. At the same time, a significant part of the stolen cryptocurrency is passed through mixers, although its share in the total volume is small.
According to the statistics of Chainalysis, 8.1% of coins in mixers were stolen, and 2.7% were used for conclusion of deals in darkness. Thus, less than one of every 11 coins passed through mixers is connected with illegal activities. In addition, 1.9% of the coins are transferred from gambling sites, which can be considered illegal depending on the jurisdiction.
On the other hand, almost half of all coins come from the wallets of stock exchanges. This includes 40% of the coins from traditional stock exchanges and 7.7% from peer-to-peer. More than a quarter of the mixed coins come from other mixers.
Centralized mixers accept more dubious coins than their decentralized counterparts. For example, the centralized service of Bestmixer, which was shut down by law enforcement this year, received a large number of coins, the source of which was found illegal. The service was used to mix over 27,000 BTCs.
Decentralized mixers, such as the Wasabi wallet, began to gain popularity in 2019 over time. In the first few months of this year, Wasabi was used to mix bitcoins worth about $10 million, and in August it was $90 million. In total, the Wasabi wallet was used to mix about $250 million since the beginning of the year.
The analyst firm also confirmed that Bitcoin had become more widely used in terrorist financing, but did not give any concrete results. At the same time, the use of cryptocurrency for legitimate purposes is also increasing. For example, processing firms BitPay, Flexa, Coinpayments, WebMoney, Coinify and Square recorded a significant increase in payment volumes in 2019, and the number of transactions increased by more than 50% compared to the beginning of the year, according to Chainalysis.
Last week, Chainalysis launched a system to report suspicious cryptographic transactions in real time.