Researchers describe a new method of laundering money through Bitcoin.

Researchers from the Blockchain Research Lab published a paper describing a growing method of laundering money through cryptocurrency. The mechanism has been named ‘exclusive mining’.

Exclusive Mining of Blockchain Transactions by ForkLog on Scribd

According to the researchers, attackers ask miners to confirm transactions posted through private channels in exchange for a reward. Such a transaction remains untracked by many analytics systems, since it resembles a mining reward.

‘Masking monetary transfers as transaction costs allows evading taxes or laundering money,’ the authors of the article note.

Detecting instances of ‘exclusive mining’ and proving criminal intent is difficult, because cryptocurrency mining is not illegal per se.

Another way to profit from mining cryptocurrencies operates on the DeFi market and is called ‘vampire mining’. Its essence is that new decentralized projects ‘siphon’ liquidity from more profitable protocols and transfer it to themselves.

An example of ‘vampire mining’ is the SushiSwap project, a fork of the Uniswap exchange.

Its creators distribute SUSHI tokens among liquidity providers at 0.05% of the collected trading fees. 0.25% of the fees collected goes to them directly, while in Uniswap — 0.3%. The tokens obtained can be traded on the market or used in governance voting.

In early September, under market pressure, the token price fell by more than 50%.

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