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On February 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an RFP (request for proposal). The RFP’s objective was the need for state-of-the-art tracing and analytical software licenses to detect criminals’ unlawful usage of cryptocurrency. According to the Criminal Investigative Division (CID); Money Laundering, Forfeiture, and Bank Fraud Unit - MLFBU; the RFP was issued owing to the usage of digital assets and digital currencies illicitly. This has generated a need for the FBI to obtain a tool that can help 'trace a significant number of virtual currencies.' As per the Request for Proposal by the FBI, the need for a tool is created to elude detection by law enforcement to help keep up with the changing trends. Particularly, the RFP requests private contractors to offer software and its licenses to the FBI for,
“Virtual currency tracing, graphing, clustering, and attribution of virtual currency transactions.”
Here are the FBI's requirements for software that can become a part of a demo that can offer the above solutions to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether/ERC-20 Tokens, Litecoin, Tether, Ripple, Monero, Zcash. Additionally, according to the FBI, the private contractors are requested to also supply software licenses for an air-gapped (disconnected) FBI system as well as an unclassified FBI system. This proposal aims to find software that assists in tracing virtual currencies representing the top 95 percent of market capitalization at the time of proposal, beginning with the biggest currency. The report further states that the program must be designed to allow tracking blockchain and other virtual assets as well, this includes Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum(ETH), all ERC-20 tokens. The RFP requires software that is built to provide cryptographic information which is more “transaction-specific.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation says that this can include,
“Lock time, wallet and address version data, shared public key and multisig (multisignature - a transaction that can only be executed by two or more signatures) delineation, replace by fee data, WPKH (witness public key hash), fee details reflected in Satoshis per byte, and transaction data byte size.”
Furthermore, the program, according to FBI’s requirements must be able to ‘geo-locate TOR-linked back-end servers and IP attribution associated with addresses.’ The FBI contract would begin by March 25, 2022, and would initially buy 250 licenses, support services, and training invoiced on a fixed monthly basis. As per the contract, the deliverables include daily blockchain updates, training materials, and software patches or downloads. A vendor has to pass two stages, primarily the phase of evolution and secondly, demonstrations. One of the demonstrations will be conducted by the FBI’s ‘controlled Innovation Lab.’ This will be on a stand-alone system to observe the product’s performance. The second demonstration would include the outlined requirements as submitted in the RFP by the FBI which include ‘IP clusters,’ ‘IP attribution,’ ‘IP reverse lookup,’ ‘on-demand API access.’ In addition with preferred elements like ‘node attribution,’ ‘address/transaction alerts,’ and ‘peel and demixing’ capabilities. The RFP published by the FBI can be accessed on the official government contract system via Notice IDDJF-22-0600-PR-0002688.