The United States Internal Revenue Service is offering a bounty of up to $625,000 to individuals who are successfully able to breach the privacy protocol of Monero (XMR), according to a proposal published in early September.

• The proposal asks for submissions from anyone who can demonstrate working prototypes that can trace transactions on Monero as well as the Lightning Network
• Specifically, the tax department desires innovative solutions for “tracing and attribution of privacy coins, such as expert tools, data, source code, algorithms, and software development services”
• The IRS will offer a grant to successful applicants with their concepts, granted $500K for the first 8 months
• Those who positively demonstrate the solution - a further $125,000 will be granted
• Monero is the most popular privacy coin on the market and obfuscates both sender and receiver identities, and transaction amounts
• The US government has been working with crypto companies to establish tracing solutions, with CipherTrace and Department of Homeland Security recently signing a contract to that end