- Federal state court successfully orders criminals to be locked out of their crypto accounts.
- CEO of On-chain enforcement technology protocol, Jurat, promises that the technology will go into other Ethereum Virtual Machine Compatible blockchains in the future.
A federal state court in the United States recently locked criminals out of their crypto using on-chain technology on the Jurat Network. The founder of the on-chain technology, Mike Kanovitz, admitted that the new development could see on-chain technology getting hate from crypto purists.
Layer-1 blockchain, Jurat’s founder, has spoken in defense of his protocol against any potential backlash it could get. He argues that on-chain legal enforcement is necessary for the trade-off for mass crypto adoption.
On August 8, Jurat’s on-chain enforcement tool was used by the U.S. District Court to lock out multiple sanctioned individuals from their crypto accounts. The owners of the accounts were individuals who had received sanctions over money laundering and the use of ransomware to extort cryptocurrency payments to fund North Korea’s weapons program.
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Kanovitz, founder and CEO of Jurat, said that the order by the United States federal court was only the first of its kind and said there would be more instances like that.
The Jurat Protocol was launched in late 2022 and formed via a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, and the technology connects blockchain nodes with court dockets to enforce court orders.
Mike Kanovitz admitted that the existence of a technology like that is bound to receive criticism from supporters of decentralization. However, Kanovitz also believes that the technology could help in bringing the necessary due process protections for digital assets, which will be of great importance to the mainstream adoption of crypto.
The founder of Jurat believes that some of the people who are currently of the belief that there should not be effective law enforcement on-chain would eventually feel different if their wallets got hacked or they got defrauded, or in a case where they lost their private keys. There would be a relief considering the existence of the enforcement on-chain technology, as it could help them recover their properties.
The first half of 2023 saw $656 million in cryptocurrencies being lost to scams, hacks, and rug pulls, according to a report made in June by blockchain security firm, Beosin.
Even now, courts have had limited means to enforce a freeze and seizure of crypto funds. The most common route has been ordering centralized crypto exchanges to freeze funds or turn over identifying information of the needed suspect.
Now, however, with the existence of the on-chain enforcement tool, which works by connecting JTC’s blockchain and software nodes with that of the user’s chosen court, this has been made easier.
Conclusion
The CEO of Jurat announced that the enforcement tool currently only works in the US and only on the protocol’s blockchain; however, Kanovitz hopes to bring the technology into other spaces in the future.
