On July 10th, the once obscure blockchain on-chain monitoring platform Arkham became widely known due to the news of "Binance Launchpad to launch Arkham."
Immediately, people started searching for the private messages that Arkham had sent to them in their Twitter DMs. While sharing the news, various registration invitation links flooded social media.
Currently, Arkham still operates on an invitation-only registration system, but it is these invitation links that have put Arkham in the spotlight of public opinion.
Some netizens discovered that Arkham's referral links seem to have leaked users' email addresses.
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 value and obtain any user's email address.
In the privacy policy statement during registration, Arkham also states that they can use email for direct marketing, interest-based advertising, sharing with third-party platforms, and social media networks.
Previously, a user named Matsumoto privately messaged Arkham about this issue and received the reply, "Yes, we are aware."
In the Western crypto world, where privacy leaks are considered forbidden, a spark seems to have ignited a greater anger, and more criticisms have followed.
Adam Cochran, a well-known crypto KOL involved in SNX/YFI development, angrily stated, "Arkham also sniffs and records user data, including their wallet addresses, device IDs, locations, etc. They then mix it with public data deleted from public sources (such as Twitter) if you share the link. It's free because you are the product."
In the relevant privacy details page, Arkham states that it will 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 does Arkham want to do with so much data?
Immediately, everyone associates it with the upcoming Arkham Intel Exchange, a blockchain-based intelligence trading platform that allows users to anonymously buy and sell information about wallet address owners. Buyers can publish information requests through rewards, and sellers can obtain rewards by providing the requested intelligence.
Many people have begun to speculate with a slightly "conspiracy theory" mindset that Arkham is trying to establish an anonymous black market, tracing from the blockchain to the real world.
However, the scrutiny doesn't stop at Arkham itself. Its founder Miguel Morel also becomes a target and is linked to the CIA.
Angry netizens have dug up a video showing off his wealth, with the title "How much money did he spend?!!!" In the video, Miguel Morel is described as the "damn god of cryptocurrency" and spends 2,500 pounds on sunglasses.
In addition, people have discovered on his LinkedIn page that Miguel Morel is interested in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States.
Furthermore, it is mentioned in the company description that their investors include the founders of Palantir and OpenAI.
Most people may be unfamiliar with Palantir, which is hailed as the most mysterious big data analysis company in Silicon Valley, founded by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and his Stanford University classmates Alex Karp and software engineer Stephen Cohen in 2004.
They hope to use the human-computer collaboration mode of the Paypal security authentication system to identify criminals such as terrorists and financial fraud, and create a software company that helps people extract useful information from different sources of information. This idea coincides with the needs of the US government, so shortly after Palantir was founded, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became its first client and then expanded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency.
Even netizens found that the Logo of Arkham is similar to the Pentagon, proving the associational ability of angry netizens.
In June 2023, Miguel Morel published an article titled "In fact, no one really cares whether cryptocurrencies have privacy", giving a glimpse into his thoughts.
However, under the numerous accusations and pressures, Arkham seems to have started to compromise.
Arkham CEO Miguel Morel responded on social media, saying, "The system was created at the beginning of the beta test with the purpose of being able to track user recommendations through email in order to reward users. Besides communicating and tracking recommendations with users, we will not use them for any other purpose. All future referral links will include an encrypted version of the referring person's email, so it cannot be reverse-engineered. This change has taken effect."
However, the seeds of doubt have already been planted, and it is more difficult to fix. Labels such as "free because you are the product" and the "anonymous human flesh market" have made Arkham a target of criticism.
There is no denying that Arkham is indeed a very excellent on-chain monitoring and analysis platform, but the values of "privacy" need to be reexamined.
Someone commented, "Don't look at everyone cursing Arkham now, but once they make money, they will turn around and call it Dad."
So here comes the question, does blockchain need privacy? Or is it enough to just make money?
