Buy Crypto, Sell Privacy: An Extended Investigation of the Cryptocurrency Exchange Evonax

Abstract

Cryptocurrency exchanges have become a multi-billion dollar industry. Although these platforms are not only relevant for economic reasons but also from a privacy and legal perspective, empirical studies investigating the operations of cryptocurrency exchanges and the behavior of their users are surprisingly rare. A notable exception is a study analyzing the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. While this study described new heuristics to retrieve a significant fraction of trades made on the plaform, its approach relied on identifying cryptocurrency transactions based on previously scraped trade data. This limited the analysis to the timeframe for which data had been acquired and likely led to false negatives in the transaction identification process. In this paper, we replicate and extend previous work by conducting an in-depth investigation of the cryptocurrency exchange Evonax. Our analysis is based on actual trading data acquired by using a novel methodology allowing to extract detailed information from the public blockchain and the interface of the exchange platform. We are able to identify 30,402 transactions between the launch of Evonax in February 2018 and December 31, 2022, which should be close to a complete set of all transactions. This allows us not only to analyze the business practices of a cryptocurrency exchange but also to identify a number of interesting use cases that are likely to be associated with illegal activity. This paper is an extended version of a research article previously accepted at the CryptoEx Workshop at IEEE ICBC 2024.