Europol Predicts Rise of ‘Criminal’ Crypto Exchanges in Digital Underground

Is the current industry landscape, where centralized exchanges dominate cryptocurrency trading volumes, about to change in the coming years? Europol predicts that international regulatory demands for identity verification on established venues will push privacy concerned traders into so-called ‘criminal’ services in the digital underground.

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Europol Investigates Cyber Crime of the Future

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), formerly known as the European Police Office and Drugs Unit, recently released its 2019 annual assessment of the cybercrime threat landscape. The report focuses on the potential impact of future technological developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing on cybercrime, and also dedicates a section to what it defines as the criminal abuse of cryptocurrencies.

The agency notes that cybercrime…