On Friday, February 24, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the use of state-of-the-art tracking and analysis software and software licenses to detect the illegal use of cryptocurrencies by criminals.
The Criminal Investigation Division’s (CID) Money Laundering, Forfeiture and Bank Fraud Unit (MLFBU) explained that the proposal was made because changes in the use of virtual currencies by illegal actors led to the FBI’s need for a tool that could track large amounts of cryptocurrencies.
The proposal would require private contractors to provide software for tracking virtual currency, graphing, clustering and attributing virtual currency transactions, and to license the software to the FBI. The proposal also calls for software capable of tracking the top 95 percent of virtual currencies listed on Coinmarketcap. In addition, the software needs to support the tracking of the following “blockchains and related virtual assets” described in the proposal: BTC, BCH, LTC, ETH, and all ERC-20 tokens.