The Royal Canadian Mounted Police wants a digital asset repository

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Shared Services Canada have announced a challenge to develop a “digital asset solution to facilitate the seizure and storage of cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens” from public blockchains.

The RCMP said Thursday it wants to be able to store seized digital assets until the relevant legal cases are wrapped, noting that it’s concerned about the possible theft of digital assets.

The challenge has two phases. The first contract would pay out 150,000 Canadian dollars ($111,532)  — not including taxes — with a maximum duration of six months.

Phase two comes with a much higher bounty, around 1 million Canadian dollars. The contract could last for up to 12 months. 

The challenge closes September 21.

As part of the disclosure, however, Canada noted that it’s not committed to paying out the total depending on a “basis of factors such as evaluation results, departmental priorities and availability of funds.”

As part of the contract, the RCMP and Shared Services Canada want a solution that would be able to process transactions for the top cryptocurrencies, but also be able to “support new blockchains in the future.”

In addition, the repository should be able to let users or officers input seed phrases and then allow for a wallet recovery, with the possibility of walking the user through how to transfer the wallet to a “system protected wallet.”

Ideally, it would also be able to “present officers with clear instructions on how to seize assets through a step-by-step guide in the application.”

Back in March, the RCMP posted a story focused on how crypto crime was “growing quickly” saying that, in 2021, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center received “reports of cryptocurrency fraud losses totalling [75 million Canadian dollars].”

Canada has been cracking down on crypto exchanges, with the Canadian Securities Administrators giving crypto trading platforms a short window of time to register with the proper regulators back in February.

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