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The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, has contracted with Coinbase, the publicly traded crypto-currency exchange and custody firm, to track transactions across multiple blockchains underlying Bitcoin, Ether, and other currencies, according to an article published on Wednesday<\/a> by The Intercept’s Sam Biddle.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The software, called Coinbase Tracer, provides several capabilities for tracing transactions in blockchains, as explained by Biddle after reviewing a contract document that is linked to<\/a> in the article, which was obtained by Tech Inquiry, a non-profit that develops open source software and uses it to track government procurement of tech by governments around the world.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The news follows\u00a0the publication<\/a> of a Baylor College of Medicine\/Rice University study this month that suggested the purported anonymity of crypto transactions can be violated by link analysis that traces the relatedness of unnamed digital wallets.\u00a0 <\/p>\n As explained by Biddle, the ICE contract document with Coinbase, which Tech Inquiry got via a Freedom of Information Act, allows ICE to “track transactions made through nearly a dozen different digital currencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether,” and has “Analytic features [which] include ‘Multi-hop link Analysis for incoming and outgoing funds,’ granting ICE insight into transfers of these currencies, as well as ‘Transaction demixing and shielded transaction analysis’ aimed at thwarting methods some crypto users take to launder their funds or camouflage their transactions.” <\/p>\n