I wonder if I can get you to play translator for me with the Treasury Department.

Sure. I'll try my best.

That's Jason Bartlett. He's an expert in international sanctions policy.

Among other things, he studies North Korea.

So he was the perfect person to help understand this statement from the Treasury Department from early May.

It says they sanctioned virtual currency mixer blender.io,

which is used by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea,

to support its malicious cyber activities and money laundering

of stolen virtual currency. I wonder, as an expert on all of this, if you could put that into

plain English for me, what does that mean? It was a very significant measure by Treasury because

it was the first ever designation of a cryptocurrency mixer.

And why that matters is that for the past year and a half, the Biden administration has

really tried to wrap its head around cryptocurrency and how it is potentially used to finance

bad activity. And if you use crypto to finance bad activity.

And if you use crypto to finance shady things like terrorism or nuclear weapons,

you don't want a digital trail.

And that's where a mixer comes in.

Think of it as a technology where you put in one kind of crypto and another kind comes out.

So some mixers have different functions. Some allow you to put in Bitcoin. It can come out of Ethereum. Or other times, they allow you to

switch around the addresses. So it's really hard to tell who is putting the crypto when, where,

and why, and how it's coming out. If that sounds to you like a great way to launder money, you're not alone.

North Korea thinks so too.

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