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The IRS Wants to Know More About Privacy-Enhancing Crypto Coins, Tools
America's tax collector is laying the groundwork for a possible assault on privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency technologies.
By Danny Nelson
Updated Apr 10, 2024, 2:48 a.m. Published Jul 2, 2020, 5:06 p.m.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is laying the groundwork for a possible assault on privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency technologies.
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- IRS-CI Cyber Crimes Unit challenged its “industry partners” to explain where the crypto tracing community stands on privacy coins, Layer 2 protocols, sidechains and the Schnorr signature algorithm in a June 30 Request for Information (RFI), as first reported by The Block.
- “There are few investigative resources for tracing transactions” that move across these privacy-enhancing vectors, the IRS said, noting a recent spike in illicit privacy coin use. “The CI Cyber Crimes program is working to get in front of this trend.”
- The IRS singled out the monero, zcash, dash, grin, komodo, verge and horizen privacy coins, sidechains Plasma and OmiseGo, and Layer 2 protocol networks Lightning, Raiden and Celer.
- What’s good for user privacy is bad for investigative efficacy: The IRS bemoaned the Bitcoin blockchain’s apparent plans to integrate Schnorr signatures, writing that such a move will undercut IRS agents’ current tracing techniques.
- The tax agency seeks estimates of how much it would cost to “support this initiative” as well as return on investment estimates.
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What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
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LUNC Surges Over 160% in a Week as Do Kwon Sentencing and Token Burns Draw Traders
The rally is driven by speculation that a final verdict could bring clarity to the project, as well as technical factors like token burns.
What to know:
- Terra Classic (LUNC) surged 74% to $0.0000072, up 160% in the past week, on exploding trading volume, ahead of Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon's sentencing on Dec. 11.
- The rally is driven by speculation that a final verdict could bring clarity to the project, as well as technical factors like token burns, with 849 million LUNC destroyed in the past week.
- The token's momentum is also fueled by Binance's pause on LUNC withdrawals ahead of the Terra Chain's v2.18 upgrade, which aims to improve network stability, despite the token remaining volatile.
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