eXch - Official Announcements and Discussion Thread

[dkbit98]

Yeah a friend of mine from Bitcointalk's FR locale regularly receives eXch's coins on his Binance account and he never had any problem as far as I know.

Is he receiving them directly to his Binance account, or first to his own wallet and thanto exchange?
I would strongly advice not to send coins directly to exchanges from many services, including casinos and other exchanges.
That combined with good address management in non-custodial wallet should be enough (for now).

[examplens]

What do you say about this? Pretty bad news. eXch goes down in history 

Their announcement in full, posted on the Bitcointalk forum

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

It's time, friends.

eXch will officially shutdown its operations effective May 1st, 2025.

Almost all of you know that eXch started as a project aimed at demonstrating to the community that alternatives can exist during times when there were none. We have never had any financial goals with this project and rather, we conducted an experiment that was unexpectedly successful.

Recently, we received confirmation of information we had previously, thanks to some friends we have even in the state intelligence sector, that our project is the subject of an active transatlantic operation aimed at forcibly shutting our project down and prosecuting us for "money laundering and terrorism."

Even though we have been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shutdown our infrastructure (attempts that have also been confirmed to be part of this operation), we don't see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT simply because some people misinterpret our goals. Starting from the date of the merger with a new management team this month, and as a result of some urgent meetings, the majority of us voted to cease and retreat instead of going against strong winds, because none of us want to cause any harm to innocent people or this forum.

The goals we certainly never had in mind were to enable illicit activities such as money laundering or terrorism, as we are being accused of now. We also have absolutely no motivation to operate a project where we are viewed as criminals. This doesn't make any sense to us.

Originally, we were just a team of privacy enthusiasts with main areas of interest quite distant from cryptocurrency, where we saw the absolutely unfair happenings. This project was an attempt to restore balance in this industry.

Our project has demonstrated that an instant exchange done properly can be more effective than any centralized mixer in terms of privacy, which is why it has been referred to as "a mixer" many times by third parties, even though we have continuously rejected this label.

Our project has shown that it's possible to operate without abusing customers with nonsensical policies, unlike projects that will accept this announcement as a "weight lifted off their shoulders" that pretend to believe the false idea that confiscating crypto from customers somehow prevents "money laundering", who rely on random and unreliable scoring systems created and operated by companies that are parasites aiming to extract money from their governments by providing consulting based on the segregation of the crypto space and blockchain data. If we were to look at these projects from the perspective of "preventing money laundering and terrorism financing", any instant exchangers that screen their customer deposits using third-party APIs and appeal to nonsensical AML/KYC terms are far from preventing money laundering and terrorism. If they were serious about this, they would need to stop hiding behind shelf offshore companies and start conducting strict due diligence on every customer, which none of them do in reality. The absurdity is compounded by the absolute uselessness of the address score reporting APIs they use, as any of these screening mechanisms can be easily bypassed.

Our project will also demonstrate that even without it, this space will continue to have ways and instruments for those engaging in illicit activities to effectively "launder" their funds. Thus, the goal of stopping eXch under the belief that it may stop all money laundering in the world is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, our project effectively provided privacy to all our customers and even anonymity to most. However, there are still far more effective ways to achieve it, thanks to these flagship projects that exist nowadays:

- Monero, with its total privacy, although not without some recently discovered issues that are serious and should be fixed with the Full-Chain Membership Proofs implementation
- Litecoin, with its optional privacy (MWEB)
- Dash, with its optional privacy
- Tornado Cash
- Bitcoin CoinJoin protocols

Another distinctive project that does not betray its mission is Thorchain. Even under the immense pressure that the whole industry had to deal with due to the irresponsible actions of those at ByBit, Thorchain was the only decentralized protocol that resisted the pressure to implement screening mechanisms at the protocol level, proving itself to be absolutely reliable. Even though all Thorchain trades are transparent on-chain, privacy and even total untraceability can be easily achieved when combined with some of the privacy-enabling projects mentioned above, when used correctly. However, the Thorchain network currently has a very limited choice of good interfaces, aside from Asgardex and MMGen wallets, and none of them are privacy-preserving, but we hope this can change.

Bitcoin privacy remains, however, in the midst of a notable crisis given the collapse of all important projects and protocols that had significant liquid CoinJoin-like pools. The most interesting and convenient of them in terms of usability remains WabiSabi; however, it needs some lightweight implementations to achieve greater popularity in order to effectively prevent serious risks associated with Sybil attacks. We certainly know that most people in this space prefer lightweight solutions to heavy software solutions, and this factor can significantly affect the popularity and usage of any good project.

Given this, we are announcing a 50 BTC open-source fund to support any FOSS projects aiming to enhance the availability of privacy solutions. We hope we can still make a difference. Here are examples of the projects we will support:

- Bitcoin wallets and protocols aiming to preserve user privacy
- Thorchain wallets aiming to preserve user privacy
- Bisq Light Client
- Ethereum wallets and smart contracts aiming to preserve user privacy (an example of such might be a "non-rigged" fork of Railgun smart contracts and wallets allowing users to operate in Tor)

Unfortunately, we will not support projects that are written in Java, JavaScript, Go, or C#, especially developers who don't take module chain supply attacks seriously and believe they're some kind of "conspiracy theory".

There will be other projects that will hopefully take our place as the industry leader in privacy-oriented centralized exchanges, and we wish them success.

Our partners will still have access to our API for a limited time, but what happens after May 1st will depend on our new management team, who will be in possession of all access to our infrastructure. Thus, we recommend launching their own liquidity pools to guarantee seamless operation. We will provide consulting and recommendations to them.

Privacy is not a crime.

[thread locked for a few days for propagation]

[hugeblack]

What do you say about this? Pretty bad news. eXch goes down in history 

Much could have been avoided if they had temporarily suspended the service after the ByBit hack and followed a similar policy.


I wish they had amended some of the TOS terms, but they might have (with a new name and different investment).

[dkbit98]

News are not very good, but I expected this could happen after they announced change of ownership and location not long ago.
I am sure some new exchange will show up to replace eXch sooner or later, but I am going to miss how easy it was to use this exchange.
They really gained a great reputation in bitcointalk forum, but I understand why they had to do this step.

[NotATether]

Much could have been avoided if they had temporarily suspended the service after the ByBit hack and followed a similar policy.

What policy? Bybit wanted everyone who ever received money from those Lazarus coins, no matter how many times it changed hands, to return i back for them. They are even trying to claw back small sums of $100-$200. Of almost one and a half billion dollars. There was very little eXch could do in this case given that it never actually received money from the hackers (as they elaborated in detail on their bitcointalk thread), so I could understand them not wanting to be extorted over this.

[salad daging]

News are not very good, but I expected this could happen after they announced change of ownership and location not long ago.
I am sure some new exchange will show up to replace eXch sooner or later, but I am going to miss how easy it was to use this exchange.
They really gained a great reputation in bitcointalk forum, but I understand why they had to do this step.

Honestly... that's what I miss because of the ease of using this exchange without any hassle.
I also hope that sooner or later there will be a replacement with another brand appearing, although I know that gaining the trust of the community is not easy, because eXch itself has been on the forum for 10 years and in the past few years they were busy again and finally closed. That's very sad.

[hugeblack]

Much could have been avoided if they had temporarily suspended the service after the ByBit hack and followed a similar policy.

What policy?

Before the ByBit story, there were numerous requests from law enforcement to eXch. I remember one of them, an FBI agent asked them to avoid posting the request publicly on the forum.
Some mixers were using them in the background, which was the primary reason authorities tracked them.
In addition to the high transparency the platform provided, they published everything publicly, making it easy to track the funds coming to eXch.


You can read more starting from here ----> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=317557;sa=showPosts;start=60

[bitmover]

One of the best services in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

I used it dozens of times, it was trusted, cheap and fast. Amazing service.

I hope the new management can maintain the same standard of quality.

eXch will certainly be missed.

[dkbit98]

One of the best services in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

I used it dozens of times, it was trusted, cheap and fast. Amazing service.

I hope the new management can maintain the same standard of quality.

eXch will certainly be missed.

I don't understand how new management can help in any way, if they recently announced shutdown of operation in few days.
Maybe they have plans to rebrand and start new service from zero all over again, but they nbeed to be really smart with this.
I am certainly looking for something that filles the gap created by eXch shutdown, especially for monero ecosystem


https://monero.eco

[Stompix]

I hope the new management can maintain the same standard of quality.

There will be no new management, the whole thing is way too hot for any "team" to get involved with it.
The writing was there on the wall just like with other services, the moment agencies start making requests you know this will sooner or later come to an end, they knew what was incoming and they decided to shut down themselves rather than being shut down, there is no point playing hero.

There will be services like it in the future for sure but not from them.

[bitmover]

There will be services like it in the future for sure but not from them.

Sad, because it takes time to build trust and reputation. I trusted a lot in sending my coins to exch, I wasn't worry about the safety of my funds and that they would certainly return to me.

Let's see which project will be the next good and kyc free exchange.

[examplens]

There will be services like it in the future for sure but not from them.

Sad, because it takes time to build trust and reputation. I trusted a lot in sending my coins to exch, I wasn't worry about the safety of my funds and that they would certainly return to me.

Let's see which project will be the next good and kyc free exchange.

I must admit that I was quite surprised by the popularity of eXch. Disappointment is palpable in the various crypto communities on Reddit and X, over the shutdown of an important resource in the crypto industry.
Certainly, the daily volume that passes through this exchange is not negligible, and it is to be expected that some service will soon appear to take their place.

[hugeblack]

There will be no new management, the whole thing is way too hot for any "team" to get involved with it.

If you follow the writing style of @eXch, you'll find that it was managed by more than one member, so I believe there is more than one team for the service. I don't know, but without a deal, shutting down the service will not affect the progress of the investigation.


A new team may emerge and the service may move to the darknet or reduce the additional transparency it provides, but frankly, without the development of a decentralized protocol, it will be difficult to continue operating without legal action.

I must admit that I was quite surprised by the popularity of eXch. Disappointment is palpable in the various crypto communities on Reddit and X, over the shutdown of an important resource in the crypto industry.

Do you have any idea if they have an active advertising campaign other than the forum? I can't believe a signature campaign in less than 3 years has generated this much demand.

[examplens]

Do you have any idea if they have an active advertising campaign other than the forum? I can't believe a signature campaign in less than 3 years has generated this much demand.

What I know for sure is that they sponsored many events that gathered people from the crypto community. Also, the delisting of Monero from most of the traditional CEXs helped them a lot. In the Monero community, eXch is very well accepted.

[bitmover]

I must admit that I was quite surprised by the popularity of eXch. Disappointment is palpable in the various crypto communities on Reddit and X, over the shutdown of an important resource in the crypto industry.
Certainly, the daily volume that passes through this exchange is not negligible, and it is to be expected that some service will soon appear to take their place.

I haven't seen people talking about it in reddit. Can you share? Any specific community?

Do you have any idea if they have an active advertising campaign other than the forum? I can't believe a signature campaign in less than 3 years has generated this much demand.

What I know for sure is that they sponsored many events that gathered people from the crypto community. Also, the delisting of Monero from most of the traditional CEXs helped them a lot. In the Monero community, eXch is very well accepted.

Yeah, monero is under attack for a long time.. personally, I wouldn't hold it