Inca Digital has been contracted to study the implications of digital assets for national security. The contract was between Inca Digital and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

What is "allegedly" the purpose of this tool?

The project in question is called Mapping the Impact of Digital Financial Assets. And if we go off of the name alone it sounds like they are not tracking the assets, or person or entities that own them. But instead are looking at the effect these assets have.

According to the press release, the goal of the project is as follows: "The aim of the SBIR[, Small Business Innovation Research,] is to understand and visualize how digital assets implicate national security". "Digital asset markets hold amazing promise, but also contend with money laundering, market manipulation, and state actors that may pose risks to U.S. national security".

And they also go ahead and state the goals more clearer in a few bullet points:

• Perform cross-market, crypto-financial mapping and analysis
• Understand relationships between digital asset firms and non-digital asset entities
• Identify how cryptocurrency may affect traditional financial systems and vice-versa
• Provide insight into the use of blockchain-based technologies linked to money laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasions across systems (e.g., fiat-to-exchange, exchange-to-blockchain, and cross-blockchain transactions)    
• Better understand money flows in and out of blockchain systems
• Identify where recipients of cryptocurrency can exchange it for local fiat currency, or goods and services, globally
• Understand how cryptocurrencies are used in different U.S. government/Department of Defense areas of responsibility

Personally, I think this is very ominous sounding. And I am getting surveillance state vibes and cills from just reading it. And given the US history with doing card balance surveillance and invading every once privacy, not only their own citizens. Which would be bad enough. I think that this is very ominous sounding indeed.

And sadly I think, as I said I feard, in my post Is privacy dead or dying in crypto? If privacy is not already dead, it is dying at an alarming rate. 

What is your thought on this announcement? Is it good they are trying to target the bad actors in crypto? And if so are you willing to pay the price? Please share your thoughts on this in the comment section down below.

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