Key takeaways
- Blockchain analytics tools help law enforcement track cryptocurrency transactions, addressing the challenges posed by its pseudonymous nature.
- These tools convert raw blockchain data into searchable formats, enabling individuals and businesses to derive actionable insights.
- Real-time alerts on high-risk activities allow compliance teams to prioritise urgent cases and report suspicious transactions effectively.
- Leading companies in blockchain analytics provide institutional-grade data collection and processing systems across various exchanges and markets.
Often hackers and web criminals use cryptocurrency due to its pseudonymous nature. Law enforcement, government and investigation agencies now have access to specialised analytics tools that can scan otherwise hard to track the trail of transactional data on public blockchains. Blockchain analytics makes it possible to follow who is buying what and paying for which product and services utilising cryptocurrency.
Many blockchain analysis tech players help to create these insights by turning blockchain raw data into 'searchable' and executable data that individuals and businesses can easily search and build services on top of.
With blockchain analytics, we can have real-time alerts on the highest-risk activity allowing compliance teams to focus on the most urgent cases and report suspicious activity. Further, the transaction graph also enables digging deep into the transaction activity, patterns and trends, all in one clear graphical view.
These companies can analyse public blockchain transactions using traditional data analytics strategies and try to track transactional data for insights. In this article, we list down the leading companies that provide institutional-grade data collection and processing systems of blockchain data across exchanges, assets, markets for analytics queries.
Chainalysis
Chainalysis is the world's leading cryptocurrency and blockchain data analytics and transaction monitoring solutions company. It provides blockchain data and analysis to government agencies, exchanges, and financial institutions across 40 countries. In July 2020, Chainalysis announced it raised an added $13M to expand its Series B round to $49M with an investment from Sound Ventures and Ribbit Capital.
What do they do?
Its blockchain data and investigative product, Chainalysis Reactor, gives insights into how and why people move funds across the world on public blockchain networks and has helped increase revenue from new government customers by almost 400%. The company's compliance offerings, Chainalysis KYT (Know Your Transaction) and Chainalysis Kryptos, are now utilised by over 180 organisations across 44 countries including Europol, Square, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Barclays and many more.
Elliptic
Elliptic is another major analytics company working in crypto-asset risk management solutions for blockchain businesses and financial institutions worldwide. Recognised as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and backed by investors including Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, SBI Group, and Santander Innoventures, Elliptic has assessed risk on transactions worth several trillion dollars, uncovering activities related to money laundering, terrorist fundraising, fraud, and other financial crimes.
What do they do?
Elliptic's dataset draws on an extensive number of both public and privately accessible sources of information in order to identify real-world identities on the Bitcoin blockchain. This information is fused with its core graph data engine to provide instant insights that can drive compliance decisions. Elliptical recently came to prominence when it tracked the bitcoin transactions involved in the recent Twitter hack based on on-chain analytics.
CipherTrace
CipherTrace was one of the world's first blockchain analytics firms targeted towards protecting financial institutions from virtual asset laundering risks and crypto-related threats. CipherTrace blockchain analytics de-anonymise funds flow by actively collecting millions of data points every week, and then implementing machine learning to its huge data pool to track flows to legitimate entities and also criminal activities. The firm was founded in 2015 to productise blockchain data analytics through its blockchain intelligence API product. The team at CipherTrace first began tracking illegal activity on Bitcoin in 2011.
What do they do?
CipherTrace develops cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering, cryptocurrency forensics, and blockchain threat intelligence solutions. Big exchanges, banks, regulators and crypto firms utilise CipherTrace to trace transaction flows on public blockchains and comply with regulatory anti-money laundering provisions, thus promoting trust in the cryptocurrency economy. Its quarterly CipherTrace Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Report has become an authoritative industry data source. The US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology and DARPA initially funded CipherTrace, and it is supported by leading Silicon Valley venture capital investors.
Elementus
Headquartered in New York, Elementus creates insights into blockchain data by providing an enterprise blockchain analytics platform for institutional asset managers, financial service companies, and government agencies.
What do they do?
Elementus gained global prominence by presenting key data for coverage of the Cryptopia hack and QuadrigaCx insolvency in leading financial media publications including Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fortune. Elementus' blockchain index methodology intends to work similarly to how Google's web crawler and index methodology disrupted the search engine marketplace in the late 1990s. Elementus has successfully raised a $3.5M seed round led by Morgan Creek Digital with participation from Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments, Stage 1 Ventures, Robot Ventures, and other key angel investors.
Coin Metrics
Coin Metrics provides one of the biggest feeds of aggregate on-chain data for fundamental analysis and trading. It was created in 2017 by Nic Carter and Aleksei Nokhrin as an open-source blockchain network data and analytics project.
What do they do?
Coin Metrics delivers transparent and actionable data to various industry stakeholders, including financial enterprises, funds, media and research outlets, and data/application providers. Coin Metrics' data aims to help users and the public to create value, use, and better engage with blockchain-based assets. It has become a crucial industry resource for understanding network data – all the operational and economic activity occurring on a public blockchain that can be observed by running a full node.
