Privacy Pools launch on Ethereum, with Vitalik demoing the feature
A new semi-permissionless privacy tool, Privacy Pools, has launched on Ethereum, allowing users to transact privately while proving their funds aren’t linked to illicit activities.
The privacy tool, launched by Ethereum builders 0xbow.io on March 31, earned support from the likes of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who not only backed the privacy project but made one of the first deposits on the platform.
0xbow.io said that it implements “Association Sets” to batch transactions into the anonymous Privacy Pools and that a screening test is conducted to ensure that those transactions aren’t linked to illicit actors, such as hackers, phishers and scammers.
gm Ethereum ☀️
It is our great honor to announce the mainnet launch of Privacy Pools!
ETH users can now achieve on-chain privacy, while still dissociating from illicit funds
It is now up to all of us to Make Privacy Normal Again 🫡
More info in this thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/3nJO0AxoD1
— 0xbow.io (@0xbowio) March 31, 2025
The Association Sets are “dynamic” — meaning that if a transaction is admitted but later found to be illicit, it can be removed from the set without disrupting any other deposits, 0xbow.io said.
If a deposit is disqualified, the user can click the “ragequit” function to return the funds to their original deposit address.
The innovation is part of 0xbow.io’s vision to “Make Privacy Normal Again” while also attempting to achieve regulatory compliance.
Privacy protocols have received considerable backlash from regulators in recent years due to their increasing use by illicit actors to launder funds.
One of those privacy tools, Tornado Cash, was sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) between August 2022 and March 2025 after it was linked to around $7 billion laundered by the North Korean state-backed Lazarus Group.
Tornado Cash has since been removed from OFAC’s blacklist after a US appeals court said the sanctions were unlawful in January 2025.
0xbow.io noted that initial deposits are limited to 1 Ether (ETH) but that the limit would be raised once the privacy protocol is more battle-tested.
Privacy Pools inspired by Buterin and others
Over 21 ETH has already been transferred into Privacy Pools from 69 deposits, including at least one from Buterin, 0xbow.io noted.
Source: Vitalik Buterin
In addition to Buterin, 0xbow.io said it also received investment support from Number Group, BanklessVC, Public Works and several angel investors.
Related: Privacy isn’t a luxury in crypto, it’s a necessity — Midnight CEO
0xbow.io also praised Buterin, Chainalysis Chief Scientist Jacob Illum, and two academics at the University of Basel in Switzerland for crafting a September 2023 white paper outlining how Privacy Pools could be built.
0xbow.io strategic adviser Ameen Soleimani also contributed to the paper, which has seen over 12,000 downloads and has been cited in nine other papers.
The Privacy Pool code also passed a successful audit from Audit Wizard. a smart contract auditing firm co-founded by former Apple engineer Joe van Loon.
More than $41 billion worth of illicit transfers were made in 2024, which made up 0.14% of total onchain volume for the year, according to the Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime report published on Jan. 15.
While it marked around an 11% fall from 2023, Chainalysis said that figure could climb to around $51 billion as more criminal-tied addresses are found.
Magazine: What are native rollups? Full guide to Ethereum’s latest innovation
Has Labour got the right strategy to tackle Reform UK?
Nigel Farage’s party cost the Tories dozens, maybe 100-plus seats at the general election. Now it looks like the party is hitting Labour too. But has Sir Keir Starmer got the right answers?
Last year, Labour won a landslide because the Tory vote collapsed, in part because Reform UK took chunks of their supporters in constituencies across the UK.
And here is the situation on 1 May this year – the national equivalent vote share at the council elections put Reform well ahead in first place. Success – this time at the expense of Labour too.
How big a threat is this to MPs? As a very crude experiment, Sky News has looked at what would happen if this result was replicated evenly across parliamentary constituencies.
Within the areas where there were county council elections are 77 complete Westminster seats with sitting Labour MPs.
This includes places like Wycombe, where Treasury minister Emma Reynolds holds. Or Lincoln, won by Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer.
Now if – for fun – we mapped the country council results from 1 May evenly across these general election constituencies, almost all those Labour seats are gone. All lost, apart from five. That’s 72 out of 77 Labour MPs losing their seats and mostly to Reform UK.
What if we took that swing an applied across the whole country, places where there weren’t local elections?
Angela Rayner in Greater Manchester and Jess Phillips in Birmingham would lose their seats.
Yes this is a crude measure – it assumes a uniform swing can be drawn from the 1 May polls – and local and national elections are very different.
But importantly, YouGov’s latest national opinion polls paint a similar picture to the council elections. Meanwhile, 89 out of 98 constituencies where Reform came second place have Labour in first. Labour MPs are feeling the heat from Farage.
The Reform threat is real. Sir Keir Starmer knows it – and this year has started chasing Reform votes. Slashing aid spending. Abandoning green promises. Hard talk about immigration and living on an “Island of Strangers”.
Sensible given the clear and evident Reform UK threat? Actually – maybe not. Look at the data in detail:
This block here is all the people who voted Labour in last year’s general election. Now thanks to YouGov polling, we know what people in this block would do with their vote now.
It shows Labour has lost more than half of last year’s voters. Just 46% still say they’d still vote for Sir Keir’s party. But – despite the PM’s strategy – they’re not actually going to Reform in large numbers.
Just 6% of Labour’s voters at last year’s general election – six out of every 100 – said they would vote Reform now. That’s all. So where have they gone?
Well, they’ve been lost much more to liberal and left-wing parties – 12% to the Lib Dems, 9% to the Greens.
So just pause there. That means the number of Labour voters who have switched to the Lib Dems and Greens, arguably on the left of the political spectrum, is three times the number going to Reform to the right.
Just 2% go to the Tories.
And much more seriously for Labour, 22% aren’t going to vote, don’t know or won’t say.
The bottom line is people who voted Reform have never backed Labour in large numbers.
This shows how Reform supporters last year voted in each election since 2005. You can see – Reform voters are former UKIP voters. They’re Boris Johnson’s Tories.
Let’s put it another way. While 11% of Labour voters may one day be open to voting Reform, 70% are at risk of going to the Lib Dems or Greens – seven times the threat from Reform.
And typically, these voters don’t like the hard line, Reform-leaning policies of Sir Keir Starmer recently.
The local elections show there is a threat to Labour from Reform. But our data suggests Keir Starmer trying to be Nigel Farage lite isn’t the answer.
Is Labour’s strategy really working?
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged crypto platform Unicoin and three of its executives, alleging they made false and misleading statements about its crypto assets that raised $100 million from investors.
The SEC said on May 20 that it charged Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin, board member Silvina Moschini, and former investment chief Alex Dominguez with misleading investors about certificates that conveyed rights to receive Unicoin tokens and stock.
Mark Cave, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, claimed the trio “exploited thousands of investors with fictitious promises that its tokens, when issued, would be backed by real-world assets including an international portfolio of valuable real estate holdings.”
Related: SEC crypto task force to release first report ‘in the next few months’
“The real estate assets were worth a mere fraction of what the company claimed, and the majority of the company’s sales of rights certificates were illusory,” Cave added.
The SEC’s complaint, filed in a Manhattan federal court, charged Unicoin and the three executives with various securities laws violations and asks for permanent injunctive relief, along with paying back the allegedly ill-gotten gains.
Magazine: SEC’s U-turn on crypto leaves key questions unanswered
After weeks of speculation among crypto enthusiasts and news outlets, Tron founder Justin Sun has claimed he owns the wallet that purchased the largest amount of Donald Trump’s memecoin, allowing him to qualify for a dinner and reception with the US president.
In a May 19 X post, Sun said he had received an invitation to attend Trump’s dinner at his golf club outside Washington, DC, as part of a reward for the top 220 memecoin holders. The Tron founder claimed he controlled the top wallet on the TRUMP token leaderboard under the username “Sun,” which held roughly $19 million worth of the memecoin at a price of $13.20.
According to Sun, he plans to network at the May 22 memecoin dinner, “talk crypto,” and “discuss the future” of the industry. It’s unclear why the Tron founder chose to announce his planned presence at the event now, when the leaderboard was finalized on May 12.
Cointelegraph reached out to a spokesperson for Sun for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Though not a surprise to many who speculated that Sun was the individual behind the memecoin purchases, his attendance at the dinner only deepens his ties to the Trump administration and the president’s family. In addition to the dinner for the 220 tokenholders, Trump said he would hold a reception and “VIP tour” for the top 25 wallets on the leaderboard.
Related: What to expect at Trump’s memecoin dinner
Sun spent $75 million on tokens through World Liberty Financial, the crypto platform backed by Trump’s three sons, including a $30 million investment a few weeks after the 2024 election. The Tron founder is also an adviser to the company.
Before Trump won the November election, Sun had been facing a lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed in 2023 over the alleged “orchestration of the unregistered offer and sale, manipulative trading, and unlawful touting of crypto asset securities.” In February, roughly a month after Trump took office and appointed Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting chair of the SEC, the regulator and Sun jointly filed a motion for a federal judge to stay the case, which was granted.
Memecoin’s potential conflicts of interest are affecting Congress
Sun’s and others’ involvement in Trump’s crypto ventures has prompted calls for investigations and oversight among many Democratic lawmakers, who argued that some individuals could use digital assets to essentially purchase influence with the president. The concerns initially slowed progress on a bill to regulate stablecoins in the Senate, the GENIUS Act, complicated by World Liberty Financial’s own stablecoin, USD1. The chamber voted to move forward on the bill on May 19, a few hours before Sun’s announcement.
“How convenient: the day after the Senate advances the GENIUS Act, Justin Sun — a major investor in the Trump family crypto venture — announces he’s getting a private dinner as the president’s top crypto buyer,” said Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, according to Bloomberg. “It’s critical that everyone understands the GENIUS Act doesn’t stop this type of corruption — it greenlights it.”
At a May 20 oversight hearing, Maryland Representative Glenn Ivey questioned SEC Chair Paul Atkins on Sun’s case being stayed, as well as his investments in World Liberty Financial and Trump’s memecoin. Though the case was stayed before Atkins was sworn in as chair, Ivey expressed concern about the timeline between Sun’s investments and the SEC not pursuing its own enforcement action.
The memecoin dinner applicants are likely still subject to background checks before meeting Trump in person. As of May 20, those planning to attend included Kronos Research chief investment officer Vincent Liu, Hyperithm co-CEO Oh Sangrok, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, a consultant named Vincent Deriu, crypto user Morten Christensen, a World Liberty Financial adviser going by the pseudonym “Ogle,” and a representative from the startup MemeCore.
Magazine: Trump’s crypto ventures raise conflict of interest, insider trading questions
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