Thread by @AnonIndustries_

In 2021 the IRS paid 1.25 Million dollars 💰 to contractors for a tool to track and crack Monero. Did they succeed🤔? Keep reading to find out! #monero

In 2020 the IRS was looking for contractors that could crack Monero, Zcash, Dash, Grin, Lightning Network and other privacy projects. Their first proposal was very broad, but in the IRS's second proposal they were very specific in what projects they really wanted cracked...

Monero and Lightning network were the only two projects mentioned in the IRS's 2nd more specific proposal. They cited ransomware as a reason for this focus, "Sodinokibi stated that future ransom request payments will be in Monero ... due to transaction privacy concerns."

Chainalysis and Integra FEC were awarded contracts for 625,00 each to work on cracking Monero and Lightning Network. Chainalysis is known to work with agencies like ICE, DEA, and Coinbase 🤮. Some real scum. But they seem effective and around a year later they announced...

that they had tracking software built for ... Lightning Network. The IRS contract allowed them to attack either Lightning Network and/or Monero and they would still receive the funds. It appears Chainalysis likely went after just Lightning Network since they announced...

a Lightning Network tool 3 months after the contract ended. We can't be 100% sure that they were not successful in their attacks but the contract specifically says that Chainalysis can sell the software and do not have to keep any secrets about this development.

So we can assume that if they had cracked Monero they would tell everyone about their new ability since that would be great for business. Integra FEC also has not made any announcements, but Chainalysis still probably has software that can expose some Monero transactions.

There are some well-known attacks against Monero that involve KYC'ed places like exchanges. The EAE attack uses statistics and a user must use KYC'ed places over and over again for this attack to work. There is a full video from
@xmroutreach
detailing this attack. This...

is not new, but it does require exchanges to share information about its users, and Chainalysis probably just facilitates this info-sharing amongst its clients. Monero is very private and if you use good opsec this privacy is well protected.

Most of my information came from this great thread by @hyc_symas : reddit.com/r/Monero/comme…

Here is the EAE article also:
monerooutreach.org/breaking-moner…