| On January 17, 2020, British tax collection department Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) published an open contract seeking bid applications for tools that can track, identify and associate bitcoin transactions with real identities. Correspondingly, developers of such “intelligence gathering methods to identify and cluster Cryptoasset transactions” can apply for the £100,000 ($130,000) contract until January 31, 2020.
The initiative is effectively a government-sponsored attempt to deanonymize bitcoin transactions — though the expectations for the tool extend toward targeting privacy coins like monero and zcash. | 
