Buy Crypto, Sell Privacy: Investigating the Cryptocurrency Exchange Evonax

Abstract

In their study of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift, Yousaf et al. (USENIX Security, 2019) have demonstrated that information provided by the APIs of exchange platforms can facilitate cross-chain traceability and thus severely hurt user privacy. Unfortunately, little empirical research on exchanges is available otherwise. In this paper, we replicate and extend the approach of Yousaf et al. by developing new methods to extract transactions using the public blockchain and the interface of the cryptocurrency exchange Evonax. We are able to identify 30,402 transactions between the launch of Evonax in February 2018 and December 31, 2022, which should be close to a complete set of all transactions. This allows us to generate deep insights into the operations of the platform as well as the behavior of its users.