The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has announced a reward of $625,000 to anyone who can break Monero (XMR). In addition to cracking the reportedly untraceable digital coin, the person will also be rewarded if they can trace BTC Lightning Network transactions.
In the announcement, the IRS revealed that the initiative is to assist Criminal Investigation special agents to track related financial crimes:
“IRS-CI is seeking a solution with one or more contractors to provide innovative solutions for tracing and attribution of coins, such as expert tools, data, source code, algorithms and software development services.”
Currently, applicants are submitting proposals to the revenue service before the deadline set for 08:00 EDT on the 16th of August. The applicant of an approved proposal will be rewarded with an initial $500,000.
According to the federal agency, the initial payment will help the applicant work on the project for a period of eight months. At the end of the given time frame, the project will be tested. Following a successful pilot test, the government will approve it and the applicant will receive the remaining $125,000.
In addition, crypto intelligence firm CipherTrace claimed that it has a new tool that can trace Monero transactions. According to the company CEO Dave Jevans, the tool includes transaction search, exploration and visualization tools for Monero transaction flows.
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