Oh, this has been a bit of an awkward week for Binance... with talk of TUSD and some "interesting" accounting going on. Sigh, I'm really hoping that it isn't going to be an FTX scale disaster. I know that there is likely some funny business going on, due to the people and personalities involved... but we really could do without another huge body blow to crypto.

Anyway, we have ourselves another Binance Launchpad this coming week... a ploy to lock up BNB? Or just business as usual? Anyway, if nothing else... the complete furor over featured project has been enough to take away a bit from the drama of the inner workings of Binance. I guess one way to get publicity is to try and pull the strings of many of the OG crypto people!

So, lets take a quick look into Arkham (ARKM) and its upcoming feature spot in the Binance Launchpad!

So, when I first read the little bit of publicity blurb about Arkham, it was a bit of an interesting pitch. A token-incentivised version of Nansen... that seems to be pretty much the way with everything in the cryptosphere... if it can be tokenised then it will be, and the gist is that market forces will solve all problems. Incredibly short sighted and full of hubris... but that is where we are with a society that is heavily focused on capitalism and markets as the diametric opposite of everything else that didn't work (and probably falls in to the same fallacies as all simplistic dichotomies).

So, the pitch is slightly different when you start reading a little bit more. Nansen is a useful tool for navigating and making sense of blockchain data, and companies like Chainanalysis have developed products to try and track and attach identities to onchain transactions and addresses. Most of the crypto that we use and love are only pseudonymous... and not that much better than a funny looking email address. Sadly, many people think that a funny or complicated name is the same as true privacy...

Arkham seems to believe that the problem of money laundering and theft will be solved by doxxing onchain transactions and wallets... which seems to make sense on the surface, but the problem is that the banking system has had this in place for ages (KYC/AML), and it hasn't made that much difference... think money mules and all of that. Identity is a dime a dozen, and the pay-off makes it more than worthwhile for people to sell and purchase identities.

So, it appears that complete doxxing isn't really a proper solution to the root problem... and don't get me wrong, the root problem is bad... but applying a wrong solution is worse. But that is the way of the world... it is better to feel like you are being tough and doing something instead of trying to figure out the problem at the core.

Where things really went off the rails was the "intel-to-earn" economy part... or paraphrased more commonly now as "snitch-to-earn"! The creation of a marketplace (solves everything!) for doxxing other people... sigh... yep, probably the part that should have been the inside voice thing!

Ouch... and it doesn't help when the backers include Palantir (intel software for governments...) and OpenAI (chow down all the scraped data....). I mean, I don't think there has been a worse looking thing since WorldCoin and the eyeball scanning orb! This seems like the tool that will be well intentioned but easily perverted into a surveillance/tracking tool... or as the saying goes, the "the road to Hell is paved with..."...

So, the first three parts of the project breakdown are very much Nansen-like... blockchain analytics.

ULTRA... yep, tick the AI box... but could you have at least named it something less apocalyptic? And this is the part that was backed by Palantir and OpenAI... and it is the start of where things start to get a bit yuck. Machine based matching and doxxing of crypto wallets and addresses... yay... of course, it says real-world entities... but that also includes PEOPLE!

... and finally, where there isn't enough information... we have the intel marketplace, where people can post and collect on doxxing bounties. Well, I guess in some ways, this was bound to happen... and was likely happening to a small limited extent on the Dark Web... but this now makes it really a thing to snitch.

Some screenshots of the current product (which is the Nansen-like analytics...) reveals a useful and pretty looking tool. But they chose not to stop there... and again, I don't really blame them... this was bound to happen in one form or another at some point. I would say that this is a real wake up call for proper blockchain privacy protocols and networks!

Okay... enough about the project and any moral implications... we are in a hyper-market economy after all, and morals currently are not priced to be worth anything. 5 cents in the Launchpad, and if things go as normal in the opening minutes of listing and trading, that will likely spike up heavily due to bot behaviour and some humans thinking that they can out-trade bots.

What is interesting is that the 50 million tokens offered in the Launchpad is only a third of the circulating supply at listing. That means that there is some serious allocation to airdrops/team that will be likely dumping like crazy... so, that might mean that part of the listing will be a sort of "revenue" raise for the team?

... and there is a huge deal of allocation to the ecosystem and community incentives... I am assuming that that is the snitch-to-earn component?

So, this confirms that a large part of the initial circulating supply at listing will be the team treasury and "community"... there seems to have already been an airdrop announced for early users of the intel marketplace.

Now, I'm sort of morally against this project... I'm not keen on the "intel marketplace" part... but the pragmatic side of me says that this was bound to happen. I still think that doxxing everyone on the blockchain isn't going to solve anything, at least, not the stated "problems". Perhaps other problems... but that is more of a rights and privacy issue then. As I mentioned before, this was likely to be a natural evolution of things, but it does seem to be a clarion call to start developing defences against this sort of "intel" and surveillance.

I will take part, I will dump... and I will hope that this concept of doxxing everything will die due to the development of better privacy protocols. But I will keep a moonbag, in case I'm wrong.

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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