Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, August 4th, 2026 — ChangeNOW, a cryptocurrency super app, and CoinRabbit, a crypto asset management platform, have jointly released a research report titled "Financial Privacy in the Digital Age." The report examines the use, abuse, and regulation of privacy-preserving technologies in cryptocurrencies, drawing on data from TRM Labs, Chainalysis, the RAND Corporation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Statista, and U.S. Treasury Department disclosures.

The report lands amid an intensifying global crackdown on privacy-preserving crypto tools. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the Tornado Cash mixer in August 2022, and subsequent enforcement actions against privacy protocol developers have sent chill effects across the industry. Several major exchanges have delisted privacy-focused assets such as Monero and Zcash in multiple jurisdictions, citing regulatory pressure. Against this backdrop, the report's central argument is that the current regulatory focus targets the wrong layer of the transaction stack.

Privacy as an Essential Safety Measure

To assess whether privacy technology does more harm than good, the research compares the actual volume of illicit exploitation against the legitimate need for discretion. The findings indicate that on-chain privacy has evolved from a specialized preference into an essential safety measure that protects:

• Individuals: Shielding high-net-worth holders from physical extortion and targeted kidnapping.
• Businesses: Preventing corporate rivals from spying on treasury movements and sensitive financial deal flow.
• Humanitarian efforts: Enabling civilians in conflict zones and sanctioned regions to receive medical payments, while keeping journalists and activists operational.

The report notes that traditional banking systems have long incorporated privacy by default—bank balances and wire transfers are not publicly browsable—making public blockchains an outlier rather than the norm in the broader financial landscape.

Regulatory Focus Should Target Fiat Off-Ramps

The report concludes that privacy and compliance are not a zero-sum trade-off. Across every category examined, the decisive enforcement vulnerability lies at the fiat off-ramp—where cryptocurrency converts into spendable currency—rather than in the transactional privacy infrastructure further upstream. This aligns with longstanding guidance from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), whose travel rule framework places primary compliance obligations on regulated intermediaries rather than on protocol-level infrastructure.

"Privacy is a basic expectation in everyday life, but public blockchains leave all transactions in the open. Finding a balance here is simply about making digital capital safe to use. With that in mind, we at CoinRabbit believe it's important to contribute to the conversation and share our research with the industry," said Walter Barrett, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at CoinRabbit.

Key Findings and Threat Assessment

The report highlights several notable data points:

• Pig-butchering fraud produced an estimated USD 75 billion in cumulative losses between 2020 and 2024.
• Physical and violent extortion: CertiK data indicates that $124.1 million in cryptocurrency was targeted in 52 verified physical "wrench attacks" in the first half of 2026 alone—a 33% increase in incidents and nearly an elevenfold surge in financial exposure compared to H1 2025.
• Human trafficking: Crypto payments linked to human trafficking networks in Southeast Asia grew 85% in 2025.
• Corporate data exposure: 36% of corporate board members cite internal financial data becoming publicly accessible as a top governance concern, with the average data breach now costing USD 4.44 million.

These cases illustrate how rapidly on-chain visibility and off-chain data leaks can translate into physical threats.

Industry Solutions for Compliant Privacy

"Financial privacy isn't a feature request, it's a baseline that every other financial system already provides," said Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW. "The question the industry needs to answer isn't whether privacy should exist on-chain. It's whether we build it responsibly or let bad actors define what it looks like by default."

The report profiles two working examples of privacy architecture designed to preserve AML compliance:

• ChangeNOW's Private Crypto Transfers, which breaks the deterministic link between sender and receiver without pooling user funds.
• CoinRabbit's custodial model, which uses dynamic per-user deposit addresses to prevent end-to-end reconstruction of a client's holdings from public blockchain data.

Recommendations for Policymakers

The report concludes with five recommendations directed at regulators, industry participants, analytics firms, and policymakers. These recommendations center on shifting enforcement resources toward fiat off-ramps and cross-jurisdictional intelligence sharing, rather than restricting transactional privacy for general users.

The full report, "Financial Privacy in the Digital Age," is available online.

About the Companies

ChangeNOW is a personal crypto super app that provides clients with a fast, simple, and secure way to access Web3 finance. CoinRabbit is a crypto asset management platform built for long-term capital preservation. Since 2020, it has maintained 100% reserves, keeping clients' funds safe and never reused.