There has been a 32.2% decline in the usage of crypto mixers in 2022
SME Experts have finalised an SBS guide on blockchain and DLT to raise SMEs’ awareness on how to appropriately use technology, adapt to EU legislation, and maintain consistency to standardisation activities
The oft-repeated aphorism ‘not your keys, not your crypto’ suggests that only a party running an on-chain node and possessing the private key associated with a cryptocurrency holding can reliably be considered the owner.
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Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Research
Global Crypto Mixers Usage Declined by 32.2% (yoy) In 2022
Bankless Times | Elizabeth Kerr | Feb 1, 2023
There has been a 32.2% decline in the usage of crypto mixers in 2022
- Cryptocurrency mixers mix users' coins with others from a large pool. Therefore, making it difficult to trace the source of the funds. As a result, mixers are popular among privacy-conscious investors and criminals.
- Crypto mixers provide users with a way to anonymize their cryptocurrency transactions. In addition, they allow for funds to be shuffled among multiple addresses, making it harder for third parties or authorities to track the origin of the funds.
See: Analysis: Into the Eye of a Tornado | Sanctions Compliance Best Practices for Crypto Businesses
- Reasons for decline:
- One possible explanation for the decline is the increase in regulatory scrutiny. Governments worldwide are taking a closer look at the world of cryptocurrency. As a result, many users may be wary of using tools that could attract unwanted attention.
- Also, the rise of new privacy-focused coins is drawing users away from the mixers.
- Another factor could be the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. These platforms offer similar privacy features without the need for a mixer. DeFi's popularity could be drawing users away from traditional mixers.
- Responsible users have reduced the usage of crypto mixers due to sanctions by authorities.
- Authorities have sanctioned leading Mixer companies, e.g. Tornado cash and Blender.io. However, criminals are still utilizing them.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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European Blockchain and DLT for SMEs Guide
European Digital SME Alliance | Omar Dhaher | Jan 31, 2023
SME Experts have finalised an SBS guide on blockchain and DLT to raise SMEs’ awareness on how to appropriately use technology, adapt to EU legislation, and maintain consistency to standardisation activities
- The EU blockchain market is expected to be valued around €59bn by 2028. SMEs can use blockchain to grow their businesses and lead the way in digitalisation and sustainability
See: More Fintech Research and Reports
- To raise awareness and assist SMEs in mastering the use of blockchain technology, a task force of Small Business Standards (SBS) and DIGITAL SME experts have finalised a SBS guide on blockchain and DLT. The intended manual wishes to Illustrate four case scenarios that demonstrate how blockchain:
- Strengthen overall business sustainability
- Help SMEs in certify their quality management system
- Ensure authentication and trust in identification
- Strengthen policy response to raising and urging geopolitical concerns
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Download the 42 page PDF report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Report: Bringing Corporate Purpose into the Mainstream and Why Canada Should Enforce It
David Suzuki Foundation | Jan 26, 2023
Bringing Corporate Purpose into the Mainstream: Directions for Canadian Law concludes that a more solid legal scaffolding for corporate purpose in Canada is necessary and puts forward five key recommendations to make it happen.
- The idea of bringing corporate purpose into the mainstream through legal reform isn’t new. As the report shows, it’s already happening in places like France and the U.K.
- Among its recommendations, the report calls for the Canada Business Corporations Act to require a statement of purpose by a corporation’s board of directors (excluding small businesses), a “comply or explain” approach to stating that social purpose and broadening the best interests of the corporation to include impacts on the community.
- It also suggests amending fiduciary duty of directors and officers requiring them to pursue the purpose of the corporation with a view to its best interests.
- “Amending director fiduciary duty to stipulate that directors have a duty to pursue the purpose is a game-changing proposal. To put that into effect boards will need to know what the purpose of their corporation is, which arguably is essential for good governance,” says Coro Strandberg, one of the report’s editors and chair of the Canadian Purpose Economy Project.
See: Why You Should Review Your Data Governance and Privacy Risks in Canada
Tara Campbell, David Suzuki Foundation:
Our current economic system prioritizes profit over the well-being of people and nature. Part of transforming to a society that values our needs, relationships and the natural world is ensuring corporations are held accountable for their actions. Establishing a corporate purpose is one tool to help enable that shift.
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Download the 66 page PDF report --> Now
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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ISDA: Navigating an Intermediary Bankruptcy in Digital Asset Markets
ISDA | Jan 26, 2023
The oft-repeated aphorism ‘not your keys, not your crypto’ suggests that only a party running an on-chain node and possessing the private key associated with a cryptocurrency holding can reliably be considered the owner.
- What defines the owner of an asset? And for a party that is not the direct owner, but holds an asset indirectly via an intermediary, what is the impact of an intermediary’s bankruptcy?
- These questions are generally settled in other financial markets, which have developed standards to protect indirectly-held customer assets by making them bankruptcy remote from the intermediary.
- The FTX collapse indicates that such norms are still evolving (or may not yet exist) in the cryptocurrency markets. When these issues are not well understood by market participants or the risks are not properly managed, unanticipated and significant loss of capital can emerge.
- The prospect of insolvency of a major market participant requires firms to consider how they manage counterparty credit risk, which intermediated or custodial structures are most appropriate, and whether the tools employed can be reliably enforced in a bankruptcy scenario. One tool available to parties may be the protection provided by a Chapter 13 bankruptcy lawyer, who can provide safeguards to support creditors and individuals in complex bankruptcy proceedings.
See: Goldman Sachs Report: Future of Digital Assets and Crypto Winter’s Discontent
- ISDA is producing two papers that will help market participants achieve greater certainty on the application of these foundational principles to the nascent digital asset derivatives market.
- This first paper will focus on close-out netting and collateral.
- The second will address issues relating to customer digital assets held with intermediaries, exploring specific questions on how they may be held, how those holdings might be treated in an insolvency scenario, and the relevant documentation and due diligence issues that would need to be addressed to achieve the intended level of customer asset protection.
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Download the 25 page PDF 1 of 2 report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Top 10 Trends Reshaping Banking for 2023
Accenture | Michael Abbott | Jan 10, 2023
A combination of well-established forces and recent developments is reshaping banking.
- Overview: In the absence of that revenue stream, banks shifted their focus from the totality of customers’ financial needs to isolated products that continued to generate fees. At the same time, fintech innovators burst onto the scene, awash with cheap capital and valuing scale over financial returns. Now that positive rates have returned, the constellation of banking products is drifting into a more familiar and predictable orbit.
- Rising rates catalyze product innovation: It will come in the form of offerings similar to that of Amazon Prime.
- 2023 will see a renewed focus on branches: Without in-person interaction most banks have struggled to maintain close relationships.
- Demistifying the metaverse: Just as mobile did, the metaverse is opening a new world of possibilities. It won’t be without risk—but banks were invented to manage risk.
- Culture and Talent: Talent will make ever-increasing demands on banks’ leadership. If it isn’t given its due, it will become a burning platform.
See: Will Open Banking Launch in Canada This Year?
- Risk everywhere: As new risks emerge, banks that focus on helping customers solve their problems, rather than on collections, will outperform their peers.
- Data becomes a product: potential to transform the foundations of banking.
- From fintech disruptor to enabler: Incumbents are poised to reassert themselves as the “rightful owners of banking”—if they can find fintech-like offerings at reasonable prices.
- Green gets real and seeks common ground
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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ARK Innovation Predictions and Big Ideas 2023
Fortune via Yahoo Finance | | Feb 1, 2023
Image: Ark Invest
Hypersonic flight, 3D printed humanoid robots, groceries delivered by drones, molecular biomarkers for early detection of malignant tumors
- Report: That's the conclusion from her annual Big Ideas report published on Tuesday by her money management firm. This 153-page deep dive attempts to handicap the potential commercial opportunities awaiting those startups and incumbents quick to embrace promising new technologies set to supplant older, obsolete ones.
- Wood believes companies that succeed in disrupting existing industries will experience “super-exponential growth”, lifting their cumulative value by an average annual rate of 40% in the process to reach a staggering $200 trillion by 2030.
- To put that gargantuan figure into perspective, the International Monetary Fund estimated last April that the size of the entire world's economy would cross the $100 trillion mark in nominal GDP terms by the end of the year.
See: a16z: Big Fintech Ideas to Tackle in 2023
- Forecasting winners: Instead of emphasizing spreadsheets and valuation models that often focus on short-term fundamentals like a company’s forward-year cash flow or earnings per share, her ARK Invest research team prefers a top-down analysis of what macroeconomic problems inhibit social progress before examining which innovators are doing the most to solve them.
- Much of the research conclusions in Big Ideas is based on predicting when technologies may reach mass market maturity by employing Wright’s Law, a general theory from 1936 that attempts to model cost degradation curves over time.
- Wood’s team identifies 14 distinct technologies they believe will feed off each other, broadly converging into five overarching investment themes ("innovation platforms") grouped around artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, public blockchains and the multi-omic sequencing of digitalized biological data.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Crypto Hacking Reached $3.8 Billion in 2022 (Biggest on record)
Chainanalysis | Feb 1, 2023
Image: Chainanalysis
2022 was the biggest year ever for crypto hacking, with $3.8 billion stolen from cryptocurrency businesses.
- DeFi protocols by far the biggest victims of cryptocurrency hacks accounting for 82.1% of all cryptocurrency stolen by hackers — a total of $3.1 billion — up from 73.3% in 2021. And of that $3.1 billion, 64% came from cross-chain bridge protocols specifically.
- Bridges are an attractive target for hackers because the smart contracts in effect become huge, centralized repositories of funds backing the assets that have been bridged to the new chain — a more desirable honeypot could scarcely be imagined. If a bridge gets big enough, any error in its underlying smart contract code or other potential weak spot is almost sure to eventually be found and exploited by bad actors.
See: Do Industry Operators, Researchers, and Regulators Agree On How Big Crypto Crime Is?
- Double edged sword: DeFi is one of the fastest-growing, most compelling areas of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, largely due to its transparency. But that same transparency is also what makes DeFi so vulnerable — hackers can scan DeFi code for vulnerabilities and strike at the perfect time to maximize their theft.
- The core issue is that DeFi developers prioritize growth over all else, and direct funds that could fund security measures to rewards in order to attract users.
- DeFi code auditing conducted by third-party providers is one possible remedy to this.
- Test protocols with simulated attacks.
- Circuit breakers. DeFi protocols should build out automated processes to pause their protocols and halt transactions if suspicious activity is detected
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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