An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain

Understand

Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called "mixins," along with the actual coins they spend.

• In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Monero's mixin sampling strategy.
• First, about 62% of transaction inputs with one or more mixins are vulnerable to "chain-reaction" analysis -- that is, the real input can be deduced by elimination.
• Second, Monero mixins are sampled in such a way that they can be easily distinguished from the real coins by their age distribution; in short, the real input is usually the "newest" input.