News & analysis
Articles
Independent reporting on no-KYC services, privacy tools and the regulation around them.
The state of no-KYC crypto in 2026
Aggregators, decentralized escrow and Lightning have quietly made privacy-preserving crypto more usable than ever, even as compliance tightens.
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Investigation
A wallet that does not collect identity, paired with a Swiss IBAN that legally cannot exist without it
OffChain just announced a Swiss IBAN linked to its no-KYC mesh wallet, EUR/CHF/USD conversion on demand, a debit card, and SEPA/SWIFT in both directions, all of it "fully offline". We walk through the four ways this can actually work, and the one Swiss law makes hardest.
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Regulation
The comment window closes at midnight, and every US-licensed stablecoin issuer is now on the clock
FinCEN and OFAC's joint proposed rule on Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuers under the GENIUS Act closes its public comment docket today, June 9 2026. Five obligations, USDC and PYUSD in scope, and what it means for self-custody on-ramps.
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Profile
The story that changed when the honeypots leaked
A 2026 working threat model for an investigative reporter covering crypto cybercrime, after the IDMerit, Sumsub, and Chen Zhi cases reshaped what an organized criminal adversary can buy. Tools, walkthrough, twenty-four hours over her shoulder.
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Analysis
Four years. That is how long a vulnerability sat in code almost no one used.
The Zcash protocol survived. The myth that selective shielding gives a privacy coin a regulatory moat without paying a maintenance cost did not. A thesis on traffic shape and audit pressure.
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Thesis
The compliance regime has become the breach surface
Cryptomus, Sumsub, IDMerit, the alleged Kraken admin leak, the Zcash Orchard bug. Five 2026 incidents that share one structural lesson: centralized vendor architectures fail catastrophically and were predicted to do so.
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Editorial
124 services, one Sunday, 26 percent of the catalogue gone
On May 31 our directory shrank from 475 listings to 351. The method, the groundshade PoW we had to solve, the half-life of a no-KYC service, and a durability commitment for what remains.
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Investigation
A four-year ghost in the Orchard, and the number that broke Zcash in a single afternoon
Taylor Hornby found a four-year-old elliptic curve bug in Zcash's Orchard pool, working alone with Anthropic's Opus 4.8 inside a custom audit harness. The market lost three billion dollars in twenty-four hours. The lesson reaches well beyond Zcash.
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Regulation
July 1, 2026 is the day the European crypto map redraws itself
MiCA's transition period ends on July 1, and the practical consequence for a Ledger holder sending more than 1,000 € to a CASP is a verification flow nobody had to perform the day before. What 'at least one suitable technical means' actually requires.
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Comparative
The privacy premium nobody talks about, and the bill that comes with it
Goblin Cards, XKard, SolCard, Laso, Card2Crypto, PinToPay. Six no-KYC cards measured across eight dimensions, with a worked example showing how the two-to-ten times privacy premium actually compounds.
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Investigation
A three-story former bank that, on paper, is a financial district
FINTRAC's $176,960,190 penalty against Cryptomus is the largest in Canadian history. The most revealing detail is the Vancouver address, an ex-bank now housing a massage clinic and ninety registered financial entities on paper.
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Investigation
One billion identities, one open port, and a SIM-swap kit ready to ship
A misconfigured MongoDB at California KYC vendor IDMerit exposed a billion sensitive records across twenty-six countries, including telco metadata, the precise ingredient industrial SIM-swap crews need to drain exchange accounts.
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Opinion
Why Monero still matters in 2026
Delistings made Monero harder to buy, not less useful. Here is why default, mandatory privacy is still the point.
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Guide
How we score services
Our 0-10 score is about overall trust, not just the KYC stance. Here is exactly what goes into it.
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Guide
A beginner’s guide to paying anonymously online
From acquiring Monero to topping up an anonymous eSIM, a practical walk-through of paying for things without an ID.
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Analysis
Custodial vs non-custodial: the risk you can’t see
No-KYC does not mean no-risk. The custody model often matters more than the signup form.
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Regulation
Tornado Cash: from the August 2022 OFAC sanctions to the November 2025 Treasury reversal
The forty-month argument over whether a government can sanction code the way it sanctions a person. Pertsev, Van Loon, Roman Storm, and the November 2025 guidance that effectively rewound the original designation.
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Regulation
The day the largest crypto exchange in the world stopped pretending
On November 21, 2023, Binance and CZ pleaded guilty in a $4.316 billion settlement, the largest in US history for a money services business. Two years later: what was required, what was not, what it means.
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History
Twelve years, one stubborn idea, still trading
Bisq launched in April 2014 with no company behind it, and twelve years later it is still matching trades. The 2019 DAO turn, the 2020 incident, Bisq 2, and why it survived when LocalBitcoins did not.
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Investigation
The fortnight that ended coordinated CoinJoin
On April 24, 2024, the SDNY unsealed an indictment against the Samourai Wallet founders. Two days later, Wasabi's coordinator was scheduled to shut down. What replaced them, what the legal theory was, and where things stand a year on.
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Guide
Residential vs datacenter proxies: when each one fails, and how to choose
Four proxy categories, how anti-bot systems tell them apart, where the IPs actually come from, and which one belongs to which job. A primer on supply-side transparency and price-per-success-rate.
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History
From Bitwala to Wirex to no-KYC: a decade of crypto debit cards, 2014 to 2025
The rename that nobody remembers. A historical comparative on the verified-card era, the October-November 2022 cascade, and how the no-KYC card segment inherited a market the regulated mainstream walked away from.
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Regulation
January 10, 2020: the day European custodial Bitcoin became KYC by default
How the EU's Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive transposition deadline rewrote the European custodial crypto market in three months, what it covered, what it deliberately did not, and the trajectory to MiCA.
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Investigation
When the police came for Mullvad and walked out with nothing
On April 18, 2023, Swedish NOA officers arrived at Mullvad's Gothenburg office with a search warrant. The retrospective on architecture-as-policy and why this raid became the European reference case for no-logs.
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History
A marketplace that closed before the winter ended
On February 9, 2023, after ten years, the Helsinki venue that effectively invented no-KYC P2P Bitcoin trading closed. What it was, why it pivoted in 2019, who lost a tool, and what the successors trade away.
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Investigation
The morning Proton stopped being a slogan
On September 6, 2021, ProtonMail's compliance with a Swiss court order in a French climate-activist case forced the privacy community to read its own terms of service. What architecture-as-policy really means.
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