Chainalysis, Gensler and a Supposed Senate Bid

Leaked Chainalysis documents reveal the company is advertising an IP-scraping system to law enforcement. What’s up with this well-placed honeypot?

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ABOUT

This week, “Opinionated” hosts Anna Baydakova, Danny Nelson and Ben Schiller address an emerging global trend: an increasing frequency of clashes between state and private money. Three recent stories bring these clashes front-and-center, through surveillance programs, regulator biases and crypto as a single-issue campaign.

Leaked documents show Chainalysis has a hush-hush advantage in the analytics race: its scraping of suspects’ IP addresses from walletexplorer.com. As CoinDesk reported, the honeypot preys on those wary of exchanges who might log their data, allowing the world’s largest crypto tracer to capture their IP address instead. As Chainalysis expressed in the documents, it’s providing “meaningful” leads for law enforcement. What are the ethical implications of such a scheme?

Next: whiz-kid Gary Gensler is not the hero crypto hoped for; the SEC chair has become a persona non-grata for bitcoiners and altcoiners alike. Gensler’s campaign against fraud, waste and abuse should not surprise insiders. Anna, Ben and Danny parse through the intricacies of a regulatory chief with his sights set on crypto.

Finally, we debate crypto and politics. With Messari CEO Ryan Selkis potentially running for senate (in 2024), how important has crypto regulation become to voters? To Selkis, it’s a single-issue campaign. How effective could that messaging be against a fractured voting field?

This episode was produced, announced and edited by Michele Musso with additional production support from Eleanor Pahl. Our theme song is by Elision.

HOSTS

Dan Ilett

Dan Ilett writes on tech, money and energy. He advises business on digital strategy and technology messaging for large deals. He is founder of Erbut - an advisory company - and Greenbang - a smart technology research company.

Anna Baydakova

Anna writes about blockchain projects and regulation with a special focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. She is especially excited about stories on privacy, cybercrime, sanctions policies and censorship resistance of decentralized technologies.
She graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University and the Higher School of Economics in Russia and got her Master's degree at Columbia Journalism School in New York City.
She joined CoinDesk after years of writing for various Russian media, including the leading political outlet Novaya Gazeta.
Anna owns BTC and an NFT of sentimental value.

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Benjamin Schiller

Benjamin Schiller is CoinDesk's managing editor for features and opinion. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at BREAKER Magazine and a staff writer at Fast Company. He holds some ETH, BTC and LINK.

Danny Bradbury

Danny Bradbury has been a professional writer since 1989, and has worked freelance since 1994. He covers technology for publications such as the Guardian.

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