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Privacy-focused browser Brave has added support for the peer-to-peer network and protocol InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), the team behind the browser announced Tuesday. 

According to the announcement, the collaboration will allow Brave’s 24 million monthly users to access content directly from IPFS by resolving ipfs:// URLs via a gateway or by quickly installing a full IPFS node. 

Users can download content using a content hash called the content identifier (CID). When installing a full node, Brave users can load content over IPFS’s peer-to-peer network, hosted on their own node. 

The integration will provide users with “a significantly enhanced browsing experience” by increasing access to content, cutting down on server costs from the content provider, and improvising the overall Internet user experience, according to a press release. 

Brave CTO and co-founder Brian Bondy said Brave is the first browser to offer a native IPFS integration. “Integrating the IPFS open-source network is a key milestone in making the Web more transparent, decentralized, and resilient.”

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Cryptocurrencies are a “particular concern” for law enforcement officials charged with policing money laundering and other illicit finance, Treasury secretary nominee and former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said during her Senate confirmation hearing today.

The comment came in response to a question from Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), who asked Yellen about emerging technical threats related to financial terrorism and how Yellen sees the Treasury’s role in the battle against illicit financial activities. Hassan specifically named crypto as a possible threat, and Yellen agreed.

“I think many are used at least in a transactions sense mainly for illicit finance,” she said, adding that the government needs to find new ways to curb money laundering from occurring via crypto platforms.

A date has not been set for a vote on Yellen’s confirmation, but according to a Bloomberg report it could come as early as Thursday.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The “criminal” share of all cryptocurrency activity fell to 0.34% ($10 billion) in 2020 — much lower than its share of 2.1% (21.1 billion) last year, according to new data from Chainalysis.

Source: Chainalysis

According to the analytics firm, one reason for the large decrease is that total cryptocurrency-based economic activity grew three-fold from 2019 to 2020.

Another factor is that Chainalysis underestimated the number of active addresses linked to criminal conduct in 2019. That’s because so much of the criminal activity that occurred in 2019 wasn’t identified till later, including activities connected to the China-based PlusToken Ponzi scheme.

In July of 2020, China’s government said that it had finally arrested all 27 major suspects alleged to be behind the multi-billion dollar scam.

Chainalysis notes that 2020’s current crypto crime statistic of 0.34% could increase over time for the same reason.  Still, the firm emphasizes that crypto crime is decreasing as a portion of the total crypto economy.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Quick Take

• The parties involved claim the trial is the first time a CBDC has been issued onto a live market infrastructure.
• SETL, the London-based blockchain firm, helped facilitate the trade.

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Count this as one of the first major acquisition deals of 2021: Coinbase said on Wednesday that it is set to acquire crypto infrastructure services provider Bison Trails for an undisclosed sum. 

On this episode of The Scoop, Coinbase chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee and Bison Trails CEO Joe Lallouz unpack the deal with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd. 

“Bison trails is going to serve as a foundational product within our product portfolio: what we call our ecosystem products,” Chatterjee, a former executive at Google, said. 

“So staking infra services is a start point, but we are going to look at other potential services that we can externalize, that we can create as a service.”

The deal represents a bigger push by Coinbase to offer its internal solutions to new client segments, Chatterjee said.

“Over time you will see we will extend additional infrastructure and API services, many of which have actually been developed to power our internal Coinbase product,” he added. “We want to externalize them make them services for the entire crypto ecosystem.”

In this episode of The Scoop, we explore various aspects of the deal, including:

• What it could mean for Coinbase’s existing staking offering
• How it improves Coinbase’s standing as an infrastructure as a service provider in the crypto market
• How the Bison Trails team could lead to new external API services for big-ticket clients and help improve existing services
• Chatterjee’s product philosophy for Coinbase
• Recent moves by rivals to snag banking licenses from the OCC 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.