I only had time to read it once but here are some interesting points:

• This would put a 2-year moratorium on mixers.
• It interestingly classifies 'Privacy Coins' in a different category than mixers.
• States there are 'legitimate uses' for mixers
• Would have the Secretary of the Treasury prepare a report that includes information on "The capacity of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and Federal and State law enforcement agencies to track, prevent the transfer of, freeze, and confiscate funds that have been processed through digital asset mixers, privacy coins, and other anonymity-enhancing technologies"

Full proposal available here: https://casten.house.gov/imo/media/doc/blockchain_integrity_act.pdf

Kraken powered by DLT Finance Asset Support The exact service start and other dates may vary. Clients will be contacted with confirmation of the dates. Kraken powered by DLT Finance will support a slightly reduced set of assets and Opt-in Rewards services. Clients holding the following unsupported assets are advised to either exchange these assets to a supported asset (e.g. Bitcoin or Euro) or withdraw to an external wallet or platform before July 10, 2024.

Verified clients’ unsupported assets, if not actioned before July 10, 2024, will be set to withdrawal-only mode and unstaked or opted-out, if applicable. Supported assets, which are currently Staked with Kraken, will be migrated to the Opt-in Rewards program.

Supported Assets

The following assets will be supported by Kraken powered by DLT Finance from July 10, 2024:
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Unsupported Assets*
Monero
Ticker XMR

Full-Chain Membership Proofs, as a concept, is a replacement for rings within the Monero protocol. While rings have offered sender privacy to Monero since it launched, they're vulnerable to attacks such as the EAE attack, have difficulties upon chain reorganzations, and in general enable statistical analysis (mitigated by distribution of the decoy selection algorithm). Full-Chain Membership Proofs prove the output spent is one of any output on the chain, effectively removing all of these risks. This means every input goes from an immediate anonymity set of 16 to 100,000,000.

Two proposals have been made for Monero offering such privacy, both under the "Full-Chain Membership Proofs" moniker (further mentions acronymed to "FCMPs"). The first was announced at MoneroKon in 2023, and was intended to be deployed with/after Seraphis. Seraphis distinguished between "membership", the output spent is one of some outputs, and "spend authorization", the output being spent is authorized by the private key holder. With that, much more efficient proofs for membership became possible, including the "Grootle" proofs it was originally proposed with (effectively a ring of 128). FCMPs further improved upon this, requiring Seraphis's new key/transaction format to do so.

The second proposal was made in March of 2024 in response to the spam attacks ongoing at the time. "FCMPs+SA+L", later shortened to simply "FCMP++s", independently adds "Spend Authorization + Linkability", removing the dependency of Seraphis. With further research and development, it was found to add several new features to the Monero protocol, without requiring the migration to Seraphis. These features include,

Transaction Chaining Transaction chaining allows signing a transaction spending another transaction, before the spent transaction is published and mined on-chain. This enables certain layer-two designs for Monero (such as some payment channel protocols).

Outgoing View Keys Outgoing view keys allow anyone with the outgoing view key to detect when received outputs are spent. Currently, Monero only offers incoming view keys, which do allow detecting spends with extremely high likelihood over the current protocol, yet don't provide 100% certainty. This certainty will make cold wallet setups and multisignature wallets much more efficient, having to bring the private key online far less often. It also allows defining a single "view key", without delineation of "incoming" or "outgoing", simplifying wallet UX.

Forward Secrecy Forward secrecy means an adversary with a discrete log oracle, such as an adversary with a quantum computer, cannot break the privacy of the protocol.

While Seraphis also introduces all of these features, it does so with a migration to a new anonymity set and a new address format (invalidating all prior addresses). The FCMP++ proposal not only aims to be faster to deploy yet to do so without the migration. This is enabled by the trade-off of not actually offering any of this functionality at launch however.

The deployed protocol would support all of these features. The wallet code to take advantage of it would be delayed, ensuring that we keep our scope small and achieve the largest goal, full sender privacy, as soon as possible. Wallets could then start taking advantage of these features on their own timeline, without further hard forks nor privacy issues. This would likely be done by merging the Seraphis codebase into Monero, taking advantage of its years of development and improved design. With that, the migration to the new key structures would be optional, and if so, the work done for FCMP++s would provide most of the necessary work for FCMPs with Seraphis.

FCMP++s are based off Curve Trees, and to make the overall proof much more efficient, Eagen's work with elliptic curve divisors. The overall composition has been largely specified, and is currently being reviewed and further detailed as appropriate. The development of the composition was funded, and an earmarked fund for academic review and auditing is still raising. If you are a member of the academic community and are interested in contributing, please feel free to reach out within the Monero Research Lab on IRC or Matrix.

• As of May 10, 2024 trading and deposits will be halted for XM^R.

• All margin positions will need to be closed by May 10, 2024 or these positions will be auto-closed.

• We will halt withdrawals of XMR on Kraken on June 10, 2024. At this time, any remaining XMR balances will be auto-converted into BTC.

I just got an email informing me that Cake Pay Web is starting back up. It will initially be invite only.

To join the wait list you can sign up with an email at https://buy.cakepay.com

Cracking down on DNM sites is currently a low priority for the Russian government. The result of this has been proliferation of Russian language DNM sites that largely operate in the open and on an open blockchain.

How do you think things like global-scale shifts in power or protocol updates will affect the blockchains these DNMs operate on?

🤘🐺🤘