On august 11th 2017 far-right groups from all over America came to Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest against the removal of a Confederate statue. The next day a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one of them. In the aftermath PayPal, an online-payment platform whose terms of service forbid raising money to promote hate, suspended extremists' accounts. So did Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Visa and Discover, two credit-card firms, followed suit, as did Patreon, a crowdfunding site. Far-right groups found themselves in search of other places to raise money. What many of them embraced was cryptocurrency.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (splc), an advocacy group, has identified over 600 cryptocurrency addresses used by members of the far right. They include ones associated with Andrew Anglin, publisher of a neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer; Andrew Auernheimer, a white-supremacist hacker; and Don Black, founder of a white-power online forum.