"The US is really evil, it's fun to follow what Israel says."
Blockchain forensics firm Elliptic on October 25, 2023 said that there is no evidence to support claims that Hamas has received large amounts of donations in the form of cryptocurrencies to finance its attacks on Israel.
Elliptic also noted that The Wall Street Journal and US lawmakers had written articles that misrepresented data so that the public believed crypto was widely used to finance Hamas military activities.
This is because a Hamas crypto fundraising campaign run by a pro-Hamas news outlet called Gaza Now has only raised $21,000 since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Of the $21,000 raised, $9,000 was frozen by the Tether stablecoin issuer while another $2,000 was frozen shortly after it was sent to the crypto exchange.
Following that, Elliptic contacted The Wall Street Journal to correct its statement that said over $130 million in crypto was raised by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad between August 2021 and June 2023.
While blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis revealed that there was a particular wallet highlighted by the media that reportedly received $82 million over the course of seven months, but they found that only $450,000 had been transferred to the wallet.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren and lawmakers have recently argued that crypto has posed a threat to the national security of the US and its allies, therefore Congress and the Joe Biden administration should take drastic measures to deal with it.
In 2021, Israel's National Bureau for Terrorism Financing issued a seizure order for crypto wallets tied to Hamas, then asked exchanges to freeze their accounts.
