Mixers & shapeshifters Popular blockchain services pose a challenge for investigators by eliminating the ability to “follow the money trail” on the blockchain as part of an attempt to track illicit transactions and identify involved parties. These services usually involve mixers, also known as tumblers, shufflers, or blenders. Mixers refer to a virtual service that ‘mixes’ one user’s cryptocurrency with another’s. Mixers pool, group and scramble crypto assets from multiple addresses for a period of time before sending them at random time periods to destination addresses, thus obscuring the money trail. A shapeshifter is a type of mixer that takes this process one step further by converting the funds to a different cryptocurrency for added anonymity. An additional use of a shapeshifter is chain hopping, an exchange from one currency to another, often in rapid succession in an effort to lose trackers. CoinJoin is a mixing service that joins or combines several payments from several users into a single transaction, making it difficult to determine who spent how much on what, and who the recipients are. CoinJoin is a unique mixer since it's secure and does not require the funds to be owned by the mixer service provider at any point in time. Thus, the service secures funds from scams. 2. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/12/suspected-tornado-cash-developer-arrested- in-amsterdam/ Mixers enable money-laundering at a massive scale, see for example the arrest made by US law enforcement of the developer of Tornado Cash, a mixer used to launder more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency from 2019 until 2022 2 . 2 1 Tracking activity on the blockchain and following the illicit money trail to an exchange 3 Keeping up with financial investigations in the crypto age 7