Several major cryptocurrency traders have reportedly begun discussing plans to enact an industry-wide blacklist of suspicious actors, to stem the tide of scams, theft and fraud in the crypto space.Bloomberg reported on this development on May 8, 2019, claiming that major companies such as Ripple, Cumberland DRW and Galaxy Digital Holdings gathered to discuss some of the practical applications of such a blacklist. Similarly, alternate plans were also discussed to form a sort of “whitelist” by introducing formal industry standards to accredit firms in good standing.The meeting was reportedly organized by a group of crypto businesses known as the Crypto OTC Roundtable Asia (CORA) and took place in Chicago on May 7, 2019.The Bitcoin industry has been rife with a wide variety of exit scams, phishing attempts and other such schemes since its earliest days, but nevertheless there have not yet been any serious attempts to formalize such a blacklist system. Bloomberg reported that, coincidentally, the firms were meeting when the recent $40 million Binance hack first became public. Considering that the Binance hack seemingly caused a temporary drop of roughly 3 percent in bitcoin’s value, the problem of bad-faith actors seems particularly salient.Bloomberg described the variety of ideas discussed at the meeting, including a “common standard for verifying customer identities and source of funds” and “having CORA disseminate information...
