Arkham Accused of Privacy Breach: Creating Anonymous Doxxing Market? Founder Linked to CIA?
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Arkham Accused of Privacy Breach: Creating Anonymous Doxxing Market? Founder Linked to CIA?
The reason it's free is because you are the product.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: TechFlow Intern
On July 10, Arkham, a previously obscure blockchain on-chain monitoring platform, suddenly became widely known due to news that “Binance Launchpad will list Arkham.”
Soon after, users began searching their Twitter DMs for old messages from Arkham inviting them to use its product. Amid regrets of missed opportunities, registration invitation links quickly flooded social media.
Currently, Arkham still operates under an invite-only registration model—and it is precisely these referral links that have placed Arkham at the center of public controversy.
Users discovered that Arkham’s referral links appear to leak users’ email addresses.
This is because Arkham uses Base-64 encoding to generate personalized referral links. As a result, if you possess a referral link, you can decode the Base-64 hash and retrieve any user's email address.
In its privacy policy during registration, Arkham also states that it may use emails for direct marketing, interest-based advertising, and sharing information with third-party platforms and social networks.
Previously, a user named Matsumoto privately messaged Arkham about this issue and received the response: “Yes, we know.”
In the Western crypto world, where privacy breaches are considered taboo, this spark ignited greater outrage, drawing further criticism.
Adam Cochran, a well-known crypto KOL involved in SNX/YFI development, expressed anger: “Arkham also sniffs and logs user data, including linked wallet addresses, device IDs, locations, etc. Then they mix it with public data scraped from sources like Twitter—if you shared a link. You’re the product because it’s free.”
On its privacy details page, Arkham lists the following collected information: account and contact data; interests, usage, and links; marketing data; communication data; transaction data; blockchain addresses; third-party data sources; device data; online activity information...
What does Arkham intend to do with so much collected data?
Many immediately thought of Arkham’s upcoming on-chain intelligence trading platform, Arkham Intel Exchange, which allows users to anonymously buy and sell information about wallet address owners—buyers post bounties for specific intelligence, and sellers earn rewards by submitting requested data.
Some began speculating conspiratorially that Akham aims to build an anonymous doxxing marketplace, bridging on-chain tracking to off-chain identities.
The scrutiny didn’t stop at Arkham itself—its founder Miguel Morel also came under fire, even being linked to the CIA.
Angry netizens unearthed an old flex video titled “How much did he spend?!?” where Miguel Morel was described as “the fucking god of cryptocurrency,” having spent 2,500 pounds on sunglasses.
Additionally, people found on his LinkedIn profile that Miguel Morel listed an interest in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Meanwhile, the company description mentions investors including founders of Palantir and OpenAI.
Most may not be familiar with Palantir, often dubbed Silicon Valley’s most secretive big data analytics firm, founded in 2004 by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Stanford classmate Alex Karp, and software engineer Stephen Cohen.
They aimed to apply PayPal’s human-machine collaborative security authentication system to identify terrorists and financial fraud, building a software company to extract valuable insights from disparate information sources. This vision aligned closely with U.S. government needs, so shortly after founding, the CIA became Palantir’s first client, later expanding to the FBI and NSA.
Some even pointed out that Arkham’s logo bears a striking resemblance to the Pentagon—truly, one should never underestimate the associative power of angry internet users.
In June 2023, Miguel Morel published an article titled “In fact, nobody really cares about privacy in crypto,” offering insight into his mindset.
However, under mounting criticism and pressure, Arkham appears to have started making concessions.
Arkham CEO Miguel Morel responded on social media: “The system was created at the start of the beta to track user referrals via email for rewarding purposes. We do not use them for anything beyond communication and referral tracking. Going forward, all referral links will contain an encrypted version of the referrer’s email, making reverse engineering impossible. This change is already live.”
Yet, seeds of doubt have been planted, and rebuilding trust will be far more difficult. Labels like “you’re the product because it’s free” and “anonymous doxxing market” have made Arkham a target of widespread backlash.
Undeniably, Arkham is indeed an excellent on-chain monitoring and analytics platform—but its stance on “privacy” now demands reevaluation.
As one commentator noted, “Don’t think people criticizing Arkham today won’t turn around and call it ‘Daddy’ once it makes them money.”
So the question remains: Does blockchain need privacy—or is profit all that matters?
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