Europol Goes for Blockchain: Validating Conference Speakers

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) has become one the world’s first law enforcement agencies to utilize the blockchain for the validation of conference speakers. According to their official announcement, speakers at the 5th Virtual Currencies Conference all received their certificates permanently stored and fully traceable on the blockchain.

The conference, organised by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), took place from June 19th to June 21st and hosted over 300 participants from 40 countries. The topic was, as the name says, cryptocurrencies and how to “foster the legitimate use of this virtual monetary system often abused by hackers, international drug dealers and the money movers of organised crime,” according to the official website.

The address is a vanity one, meaning that you chose part of it yourself, and begins with 1Europol. Getting such a long vanity address and encoding the message takes a fair share of skill, which shows that the agency does know what they’re doing with blockchain. The act itself was a proof of goodwill and an admission that blockchain has relevant use cases, no matter how small.

The presentation itself focused on “tracing, attribution and demixing approaches” according to the website, with case studies where suspects were detected through cryptocurrency tracing, including phishing incidents, DDoS extortion, takedowns of dark web marketplaces and malicious cryptocurrency mining.

As Trustnodes put it in an article, this is suggesting that “old fashioned detective police investigations work even with the very newest technology, but the far more interesting suggestions for some might be that Europol has Bitcoins.”

Meanwhile, having commenced in May 2017, the three-year TITANIUM project, which stands for Tools for the Investigation of Transactions in Underground Markets, aims to develop technical solutions for investigating and mitigating crime and terrorism involving virtual currencies and underground market transactions, as reported by Cryptonews.com.