Founder Claims Project “is the subject of an active transatlantic operation aimed at forcibly shutting our project down and prosecuting us for money laundering and terrorism”.
eXch, an instant crypto exchange long preferred by users desiring privacy, has abruptly and unexpectedly announced that they are shutting down their service.
After being falsely accused of helping facilitate laundering stolen crypto, as much as $1.5 billion USD worth, on behalf of the North Korean-backed hacker group Lazarus, it was widely assumed that the company was facing pressure from law enforcement agencies. The founder confirmed as much in statement given to Monero.Forex and other news agencies, citing insider knowledge about intentional investigations, and announced that the service would be shutting down permanently on May 1, 2025.
In the announcement, the team behind the service stated that “Privacy is not a crime”. The also announced a whopping 50 BTC fund, currently worth over $4.3M USD, to help other privacy-focused projects, such as other anonymous to use, no-kyc crypto exchanges.
Below is the statement in full.
OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
It’s time, friends.
eXch will officially shutdown its operations effective May 1st, 2025.
Almost all of you know that eXch started as a project aimed at demonstrating to the community that alternatives can exist during times when there were none. We have never had any financial goals with this project and rather, we conducted an experiment that was unexpectedly successful.
Recently, we received confirmation of information we had previously, thanks to some friends we have even in the state intelligence sector, that our project is the subject of an active transatlantic operation aimed at forcibly shutting our project down and prosecuting us for “money laundering and terrorism.”
Even though we have been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shutdown our infrastructure (attempts that have also been confirmed to be part of this operation), we don’t see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT simply because some people misinterpret our goals. Starting from the date of the merger with a new management team this month, and as a result of some urgent meetings, the majority of us voted to cease and retreat instead of going against strong winds, because none of us want to cause any harm to innocent people or this forum.
The goals we certainly never had in mind were to enable illicit activities such as money laundering or terrorism, as we are being accused of now. We also have absolutely no motivation to operate a project where we are viewed as criminals. This doesn’t make any sense to us.
Originally, we were just a team of privacy enthusiasts with main areas of interest quite distant from cryptocurrency, where we saw the absolutely unfair happenings. This project was an attempt to restore balance in this industry.
Our project has demonstrated that an instant exchange done properly can be more effective than any centralized mixer in terms of privacy, which is why it has been referred to as “a mixer” many times by third parties, even though we have continuously rejected this label.
Our project has shown that it’s possible to operate without abusing customers with nonsensical policies, unlike projects that will accept this announcement as a “weight lifted off their shoulders” that pretend to believe the false idea that confiscating crypto from customers somehow prevents “money laundering”, who rely on random and unreliable scoring systems created and operated by companies that are parasites aiming to extract money from their governments by providing consulting based on the segregation of the crypto space and blockchain data. If we were to look at these projects from the perspective of “preventing money laundering and terrorism financing”, any instant exchangers that screen their customer deposits using third-party APIs and appeal to nonsensical AML/KYC terms are far from preventing money laundering and terrorism. If they were serious about this, they would need to stop hiding behind shelf offshore companies and start conducting strict due diligence on every customer, which none of them do in reality. The absurdity is compounded by the absolute uselessness of the address score reporting APIs they use, as any of these screening mechanisms can be easily bypassed.
Our project will also demonstrate that even without it, this space will continue to have ways and instruments for those engaging in illicit activities to effectively “launder” their funds. Thus, the goal of stopping eXch under the belief that it may stop all money laundering in the world is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, our project effectively provided privacy to all our customers and even anonymity to most. However, there are still far more effective ways to achieve it, thanks to these flagship projects that exist nowadays:
– Monero, with its total privacy, although not without some recently discovered issues that are serious and should be fixed with the Full-Chain Membership Proofs implementation
– Litecoin, with its optional privacy (MWEB)
– Dash, with its optional privacy
– Tornado Cash
– Bitcoin CoinJoin protocols
Another distinctive project that does not betray its mission is Thorchain. Even under the immense pressure that the whole industry had to deal with due to the irresponsible actions of those at ByBit, Thorchain was the only decentralized protocol that resisted the pressure to implement screening mechanisms at the protocol level, proving itself to be absolutely reliable. Even though all Thorchain trades are transparent on-chain, privacy and even total untraceability can be easily achieved when combined with some of the privacy-enabling projects mentioned above, when used correctly. However, the Thorchain network currently has a very limited choice of good interfaces, aside from Asgardex and MMGen wallets, and none of them are privacy-preserving, but we hope this can change.
Bitcoin privacy remains, however, in the midst of a notable crisis given the collapse of all important projects and protocols that had significant liquid CoinJoin-like pools. The most interesting and convenient of them in terms of usability remains WabiSabi; however, it needs some lightweight client implementations to achieve greater popularity in order to effectively prevent serious risks associated with Sybil attacks. We certainly know that most people in this space prefer lightweight solutions to heavy software solutions, and this factor can significantly affect the popularity and usage of any good project.
Given this, we are announcing a 50 BTC open-source fund to support any FOSS projects aiming to enhance the availability of privacy solutions. We hope we can still make a difference. Here are examples of the projects we will support:
– Bitcoin wallets and protocols aiming to preserve user privacy
– Lightweight clients for WabiSabi
– Thorchain wallets aiming to preserve user privacy
– Bisq Light Client
– Ethereum wallets and smart contracts aiming to preserve user privacy (an example of such might be a “non-rigged” fork of Railgun smart contracts and wallets allowing users to operate in Tor)
Unfortunately, we will not support projects that are written in Java, NodeJS, Go, or C#, especially developers who don’t take module chain supply attacks seriously and believe they’re some kind of “conspiracy theory”.
There will be other projects that will hopefully take our place as the industry leader in privacy-oriented centralized exchanges, and we wish them success.
Our partners will still have access to our API for a limited time, but what happens after May 1st will depend on our new management team, who will be in possession of all access to our infrastructure. Thus, we recommend launching their own liquidity pools to guarantee seamless operation. We will provide consulting and recommendations to them.
Privacy is not a crime.
