UK's NCA calls for coin mixers

The NCA said regulation would force mixers to comply with money laundering laws, with an obligation to carry out customer checks and audit trails of currencies passing through the platforms.

So-called ‘decentralised crypto mixers’, also known as CoinJoin, can be used to disguise transactions that are otherwise traceable on blockchains, publicly viewable digital ledgers where the transfer of cryptocurrencies are recorded.

The open-source software requires multiple parties to sign a digital contract that allows coins from different wallets to be shuffled and redistributed – making it difficult to trace where the money has originated from.