Arkham accused of leaking privacy: Establishing an anonymous human flesh market? Founder involved with the CIA?

Author: TechFlow Intern

On July 10, the once obscure blockchain on-chain monitoring platform Arkham became seemingly well-known due to the news "Binance Launchpad will launch Arkham."

Immediately, everyone began to search their Twitter DM lists for past messages from Arkham inviting them to use its products, and amidst the excitement, various registration invitation links flooded social media.

Currently, Arkham still employs an invitation-only registration system, but it is this invitation link that has placed Arkham at the center of public opinion.

Some netizens discovered that Arkham's referral links seem to leak users' email addresses.

This is because Arkham uses Base-64 encoding to generate personalized referral links. Therefore, if you have a referral link, you can decode the Base-64 hash and obtain any user's email.

In the privacy policy statement during registration, Arkham also indicated that they could use email for direct marketing, interest-based advertising, and sharing information with third-party platforms and social media networks.

Previously, a user named Matsumoto privately messaged Arkham about this issue, and the response was, "Yes, we are aware."

In the Western crypto world, where privacy breaches are considered taboo, a spark seems to have ignited greater outrage, and more criticism has poured in.

Notable crypto KOL Adam Cochran, who participated in the construction of SNX/YFI, expressed his anger, stating, "Arkham also sniffs and records its users' data, including binding their wallet addresses, device IDs, locations, etc. Then they mix it with public data removed from public sources (like Twitter) if you shared the link. It's free because you are the product."

On the relevant privacy details page, Arkham stated that it would collect the following information: account and contact data; interests, usage, and links; marketing data; communication data; transaction data; blockchain addresses; third-party information sources; device data; online activity information…

What exactly does Arkham intend to do with such a vast amount of data?

People immediately thought of Arkham's upcoming on-chain intelligence trading platform, Arkham Intel Exchange, which allows users to anonymously buy and sell information about wallet address owners. Buyers can post information requests through bounties, and sellers can earn rewards by submitting the requested intelligence.

Many began to speculate with a hint of "conspiracy theory," that Arkham is trying to establish an anonymous human hunting market, tracking from on-chain to off-chain.

The scrutiny does not stop at Arkham itself; its founder Miguel Morel is also under fire, with connections made to the CIA.

Angry netizens unearthed an old flaunting video titled "How Much Did He Spend?!!" in which Miguel Morel is described as "the f***ing god of cryptocurrency," having spent £2,500 on sunglasses.

Additionally, people found on his LinkedIn profile that Miguel Morel's interests include the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States.

At the same time, it is noted in the company description that their investors include the founders of Palantir and OpenAI.

Most may not be familiar with Palantir, which is hailed as Silicon Valley's most mysterious big data analytics company, founded in 2004 by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Stanford classmate Alex Karp, and software engineer Stephen Cohen, among others.

They aimed to use the human-machine collaboration model of PayPal's security certification system to identify terrorists and financial fraud, creating a software company that helps people extract useful information from different sources. This idea resonated with the needs of the U.S. government, so shortly after its founding, the CIA became its first client, followed by the FBI and NSA.

Some netizens even pointed out that Arkham's logo closely resembles the U.S. Pentagon, proving that we should not underestimate the imaginative capabilities of angry netizens.

In June 2023, Miguel Morel published an article titled "In fact, no one really cares whether cryptocurrency has privacy," which gives insight into his inner thoughts.

However, under the weight of numerous accusations and pressure, Arkham seems to have begun to compromise.

Arkham CEO Miguel Morel responded on social media, stating, "The system was created at the start of the beta phase to be able to track user referrals via email to reward users. Aside from communicating with users and tracking referrals, we will not use them for any other purpose. All future referral links will include an encrypted version of the referrer's email, making it impossible to reverse-engineer. This change has already taken effect."

However, the seeds of doubt have already been sown, and repairing the damage will be even more difficult. "It's free because you are the product," and the label of "anonymous human hunting market" have made Arkham a target of criticism.

It is undeniable that Arkham is indeed an excellent on-chain monitoring and analysis platform, but the values surrounding "privacy" need to be re-evaluated.

Some commented, "Don't look at everyone cursing Arkham now; they will make money and then turn around to call it daddy."

So the question arises, Does blockchain need privacy? Or is it just about making money?