[https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/exclusive-large-bitcoin-payments-to-rightwing-activists-a-month-before-capitol-riot-linked-to-foreign-account-181954668.html](https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/exclusive-large-bitcoin-payments-to-rightwing-activists-a-month-before-capitol-riot-linked-to-foreign-account-181954668.html) “On Dec. 8, someone made a simultaneous transfer of 28.15 bitcoins — worth more than $500,000 at the time — to 22 different virtual wallets, most of them belonging to prominent right-wing organizations and personalities.”

While cryptocurrency has been used by extremist groups and criminals to raise funds while shielding their identities, bitcoin is pseudonymous rather than anonymous. Bitcoin wallet addresses are permanent, and the digital ledger of transactions, called the blockchain, is public and can’t be changed. That means if people identify their bitcoin wallet addresses, as many right-wing groups do to raise funds, transactions can be traced, which is what allowed Chainalysis to uncover information about the source of the large December donations. The source of the funding, according to research conducted by Chainanalysis, appears to be a computer programmer based in France who created an account in 2013 — and who maintained a personal blog, which was not updated between 2014 and Dec. 9, 2020, the day after the “donations.”

U.S. law enforcement is investigating whether the donations were linked to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. December 8th is the day electors were certified. It was the date Trump would have known that he would have to stop the count to keep Biden from taking office.