Blockchain data firm Arkham Intelligence launched a bounty marketplace that will let blockchain users buy and sell on-chain data.

The marketplace, called the Arkham Intel Exchange, is set to go live on July 18 and will allow anyone with information about a blockchain wallet or its owner to sell it for a price or auction to other users. The exchange will also feature a native token ARKM, which will be issued on the Binance Launchpad with 50 million tokens up for sale initially. 

“This creates a liquid market for information, allowing on-chain sleuths to monetize their work at scale: ‘intel-to-earn’” said Arkham. 

Intel sold on the exchange will be exclusively held by the buyer for 90 days, after which it will be propagated to all users. 

While Arkham envisions that the new platform will be a novel way for on-chain sleuths to monetize their skills, privacy advocates within the crypto community were not sold on the idea of trading personal wallet information for a bounty.

“Creating a surveillance marketplace doesn’t make Web3 safer. Instead it makes it far more dangerous…What if hackers were able to see exactly how much you held in your bank account?” tweeted Alex Pruden, CEO of Layer 1 privacy blockchain Aleo.

Adding to their grievances was the revelation that Arkham has been leaking the email addresses of users signing up for their waitlist through a web link referral program.

The URLs shared by users end with a string of characters that can easily be deciphered to yield their email addresses encoded in BASE64.