The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is set to issue new rules to restrict financial transactions to enforce existing sanctions against Russia. The rules, dubbed the Russian Harmful Foreign Activities Sanctions Regulations, take aim at “deceptive or structured transactions or dealings to circumvent any United States sanctions, including through the use of digital currencies or assets or the use of physical assets.”
While these rules reiterate existing rules, the crypto lesson here is clear: transactions on the blockchain are nowhere near as “anonymous” as popular myths would have you believe. There are privacy coins — such as Monero (XMR) — that are very hard to trace, but all crypto transactions are written to public ledgers (blockchains), which means that they are hiding in plain sight.
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