The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) has become the world’s first law enforcement agency to utilize the blockchain for the validation of conference speakers. They say:
“In order to practically demonstrate the benefits of the tamper-proof decentralised ledger technology, all speakers received Europol’s certificates permanently stored and fully traceable within Bitcoin blockchain.”

They’ve apparently created a vanity address that reads 1Europol and started using it on the 16th of June 2018. So now we have proof that there was a 5th Europol VC Conference speaker, but who that was exactly history won’t know.
That there was such conference, however, there will be no doubt for as long as bitcoin runs for now no one can ever change that statement.
This was done as a sort of good will gesture to show that they like the blockchain and that it has decent use cases, but it also clearly shows they have some considerable blockchain related skills at the agency since you need some decent technical knowledge to get that fairly long vanity address and to encode the message.
The conference in question was held in Hague between the 19th and the 21st of June 2018 with 300 individuals participating from 40 countries.
That included a number of representatives from exchanges who Europol says “foster the legitimate use of [digital] currencies by implementing strong Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and working hand in hand with law enforcement.
Private sector participants included Bitcoin.de, Bitfinex, BitPanda, Bitstamp, BitPay, Blockchain.info, CEX, Coinfloor, Coinhouse, Cryptopia, Cubits, Kraken, LocalBitcoins, OKCoin, SpectroCoin and Xapo.”
The conference focused on identifying methods for blockchain addresses to establish who transacted with who, when, and in what amounts. They say:
“The presentation focused, among other things, on tracing, attribution and demixing approaches. Twelve operational case studies were presented, where suspects were detected through cryptocurrency tracing, including phishing incidents, DDoS extortion, takedowns of dark web marketplaces and malicious cryptocurrency mining.”
So suggesting that old fashioned detective police investigations work even with the very newest technology, but the far more interesting suggestions for some might be that Europol has bitcoins.
Copyrights Trustnodes.com
J J June 22, 2018 at 5:19 pm
A very good article covering our event, thanks for your kind words and greetings from Europol 😉
The hash actually points to an index of speakers containing individual hashes for all speakers.
Eric W June 22, 2018 at 6:11 pm
haha this is really nice, well done with the blockchain bit
also the funds are sent to another vanity address
Luke June 22, 2018 at 6:38 pm
Good spot! 🙂 I would not have noticed it
cryptonator June 22, 2018 at 9:52 pm
managed to decypher the recipient address. beep beep
Woootanclan June 23, 2018 at 8:45 am
Would be nice to have a tutorial on how to record stuff in the blockchain without using commercial services that advertise their services in the message
FunnyB June 22, 2018 at 6:25 pm
So many exchanges, even local bitcoins.. I wonder how to get an invite into these conferences!
coinooo June 22, 2018 at 7:58 pm
I would be more interested where did they get those Bitcoins from;-)
FunnyB June 27, 2018 at 9:48 pm
Payment to 1EURoPoL came from an exchange but the exchange is not tagged on blockchain.info.
Meek June 24, 2018 at 4:04 pm
Interesting coinbase is not on the list
anonymous June 23, 2018 at 3:44 am
Hey where can I buy a ticket for the next year? I want to see the exchanges! Also,verycurious what mixer did they demix.