LocalBitcoins, a popular peer-to-peer trading platform, has apparently managed to scale down a significant amount of its dark web transactions this year. According to the firm, the trading platform saw a decrease in operations from the dark web by more than 70 per cent between September 2019 and May 2020.
LocalBitcoins’ chief marketing officer, Jukka Blomberg, has reportedly claimed that the platform’s enforced anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer regulations back in September 2019 have caused a drop.
Dark web transactions drop as BTC trading volume drops
The firm also stated that the statistics were analyzed through the aggregation tool of the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and LocalBitcoin. The 70 percent drop may seem insubstantial as the peer-to-peer platform saw a giant down the volume decrease of Bitcoin traded back in 2019.
As a result, the weekly bitcoin trading volumes of the weekly Bitcoins on LocalBitcoins slumped from nearly 14,000 bitcoins in January 2019 to nearly 4,000 bitcoins in January of this year, as statistics by analytical firm Coin Dance. Nonetheless, the P2P platform was experiencing only a 20 percent drop in volumes of bitcoin trading. In weekly trading, the volume dropped from a median of 5,000 BTC to 4,000 BTC.
Steady growth noticeable
The Bitcoin trading platform has experienced some steady growth in recent times as per Bloomberg, in addition to the significant improvement in the handling of illicit activities. He noted the platform had noted a steady increase in trading volumes in all regions over the past few months.
Notwithstanding the improvement, some publications still suggest that LocalBitcoin does accelerate a massive amount of illegal cryptocurrency transactions. A recent report by blockchain security analytics firm CypherTrace, in the first half of 2020 the P2P platform received more than 99 percent of illicit dark web bitcoin transactions.
According to the report, the illegal crypto was transacted from Finnish exchange platforms. Furthermore, the cybersecurity firm noted that Finnish crypto exchanges have the most significant portion of the illicit cryptocurrency for the third year consecutively.