Despite the surviving myth that crime loves cryptocurrencies for untraceable transactions, criminal activity on the public blockchain last year accounted for only 1.1% of all transactions.
 

However, converted to dollar value, this share represents more than $ 11.5 billion and an increase of 180% over the previous year. On the other hand, the share of criminal activity in the blockchain increased significantly in 2019, mainly because of the huge increase in scam, which has become the most popular type of fraudulent blockchain activity according to the economic impact. Scammers collected cryptocurrencies for about $ 4.3 billion from millions of victims and sent about the same amount to others to transfer these funds to fiat (the total volume of these transactions exceeded $ 8.6 billion). However, the vast majority of this amount goes beyond just two large Ponzi programs, without which the total share of crime in transactions would represent only 0.46% of all crypto currency onchain activity, even lower than the total share of cybercrime in total transactions in 2018 ( 0.5% and approximately $ 4 billion). In contrast, dark market activity on public blockchains has been well below 1% of all illegal blockchain activity for the last two years (data include BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, uSdT, PAX, ZrX, BnB, oMG, uSdC, TuSd, dAI, WETH, HT, Gno and ZIL).