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Hackers, ransomware perpetrators and other online criminals overwhelmingly continued using centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in 2023, a year in which the estimated flow of assets from known illicit addresses to and through such platforms exceeded $22 billion. But sophisticated syndicates such as North Korea's Lazarus Group shifted their money laundering operations towards decentralized finance, or DeFi, and to decentralized "bridge protocols" specifically, Chainalysis, a blockchain research company in New York, concluded in an 11-page report Thursday. Inflows of bitcoins and other digital assets through YoMix, a cryptocurrency mixing platform, meanwhile grew more than fivefold from 2022 to 2023, according to Chainalysis,...