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No, Monero's privacy was not suddenly violated in this viral video

Yesterday, Cointelegraph claimed to have discovered groundbreaking research on Monero privacy. The crypto publication claimed that a now-deleted video demonstrated Chainalysis' methods for tracing Monero (XMR) transactions to individual users. Unfortunately, the journalists neglected to mention that the video itself was popular among Monero proponents and provided Monero users with an understanding of how to circumvent Chainalysis' techniques.

Chainalysis tools combine “rogue” nodes, “bait” inputs, and IP logs from popular wallets to deanonymize XMR transactions.

The crypto privacy community quickly took notice, commenting on Cointelegraph’s post and asking why these techniques were being labeled as “breaking news.”

A news video without news

The video explained how Chainalysis – a US government contractor that runs a massive data collection operation across major blockchains, exchanges and crypto services – collects data from Monero nodes. By piecing together data such as repeated transactions, IP location and other data points, Chainalysis enables law enforcement to track down criminal activity.

However, the fact that Chainalysis runs Monero nodes and collects IP addresses is not news. This has been common knowledge in the Monero community for years.

Well-known Monero user Csilla Brimer summed up the non-event as follows: Decrypt, “In short, this strategy does not compromise the privacy of users on the blockchain if these fake nodes are avoided or Tor is used.”

Instead of publishing the video to spread news, Monero users were simply discussing privacy protection tactics given the obvious presence of Chainalysis in their ecosystem.

Monero users talked about running their own nodes to avoid being dependent on Chainalysis' nodes. They recommended IP obfuscation services like Dandelion. They discussed privacy-friendly exchanges with less government cooperation to avoid exchanges like MorphToken that partner with Chainalysis.

In short, the video did not reveal a technique to deanonymize Monero transactions that was new to the Monero community. Instead, it reminded users to use smart ways to protect their privacy given Chainalysis' data collection operations.

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