Marian Muller from Caudena: "There is no room in our industry for bad actors such as eXch that undermine the integrity of the crypto ecosystem and knowingly process transactions known to fund North Korea’s regime."
https://caudena.com/exch-analysing-the-infrastructure-of-north-koreas-favourite-mixing-service/So it seems now random people like Marian Muller from Caudena decide who can be in the industry and who can't; thus, next time you think of opening an exchange, don't forget to ask for Marian Muller's permission.
But in reality, we would like to address Marian's lies, as he seems to be a very incompetent
researcher content writer who constructs his opinion based on the opinions of other, even more incompetent researchers, and prefers to throw dirt at our service instead of doing his own research and appealing to facts.
On calling us a mixer:Marian argued in his article that just because we accept money from mixers, it makes us a mixer, which is a very common fallacy that newbies in this industry take.
We would like to remind Marian that the fact a service accepts funds from mixers doesn't make it a mixer at all.
eXch is an exchange that doesn't consider mixing services and privacy protocols illegal and has the full right to process money from them.
We accept funds from non-banned (that translates to non-OFAC-listed) centralized mixers and CoinJoin protocols that are totally legal outside the U.S., where we don't operate.
We also accept funds from Tornado Cash because it's not illegal anymore.
We accept Monero after all.
If you think mixers are illegal or have any problem with us accepting money from mixers, it's merely your problem, and you should seek medical help from your psychiatrist, instead of trying to speak on behalf of the whole industry.
On counting our deposit addresses that go into the thousands:Yes, we are an exchange. Exchanges use individual and unique deposit addresses per customer. We have thousands of customers. It's surprising that the author didn't know how exchanges work prior to publishing his article.
However, you were only able to count them because we allowed you to. We were using static aggregation addresses for transparency reasons without trying to hide anything (and in order to not be called a mixer), but it seems in this industry the more transparent and honest you are, the more scrutiny you will get.
On us "heavily" depending on Thorchain:Marian's infographics that falsely misrepresent eXch as the originator of some Thorchain transactions do not represent the truth at all. There are many lesser-known other services that use Thorchain as well, and some people, like Marian, thinking all transactions in the network that don't use affiliation handles belong to eXch is a common fallacy.
Our Thorchain usage is really minor in comparison to our own assets' daily movements, and there are some exceptions when we move 30-50 BTC between our wallets to rebalance our liquidity that happen 1-2 times a month.
On the lack of evidence in Marian's article:The article doesn't represent any factual appeals, instead relying on some screenshots of his custom NodeJS site that is built to represent eXch in a bad light for the purposes of writing that article.
We have analyzed the information represented in these screenshots against our own statistics and found nothing nearly comparable to what it says about us.
With this exact approach used by that writer, you can take Binance or ByBit's addresses, grab their volume numbers, and divide them into blocks of good and bad transactions, which actually proves nothing.
On eXch being North Korea’s favorite mixing service:With this toddler-level of statements, Marian could as well call us fascists and burn some Teslas, similar to what people who hate Elon Musk do.
The fact we processed a very low amount of the total ByBit hack doesn't make us anyone's favorite service. The fact that Elliptic has refused us as a customer due to their elitist policies when a year ago we tried to adopt the policy of rejecting stolen funds by refunding them to the sender should concern him more than us processing some small portion of hacked funds from ByBit, which we admitted already in our previous publications.
But honestly we don't need to, because we don't consider opinion of people such as Marian Muller or his peers any coherent and will continue to do what we find best for the industry, which is shielding people seeking some privacy on-chain from people like Marian.
Conclusion:The article published on Caudena about eXch was written by an unprofessional blogger whose intention was rather to represent eXch in a bad light than to provide facts.
We at eXch believe there is no room in our industry for such bad researchers and liars as Caudena, which allows scum like Marian Muller to write accusatory articles without foundation, like he wrote about us in an attempt to sell himself to federal agencies as an investigator.
Such misrepresentations can seriously harm the ecosystem and mislead law enforcement authorities, which can be dangerous for the industry.
