During the last few years, blockchain surveillance has increased a great deal and in the early days around 2013-14, there were only a handful of firms. Now there are more than 20 blockchain analysis companies that monitor addresses, transactions, and making sure addresses are AML/CFT compliant as well.
The Rise of Blockchain Analysis Ventures
In the early days before 2013-14, bitcoiners and cryptocurrency users didn’t really hear about blockchain surveillance. Nowadays, there’s a large slew of companies offering services like analytics, monitoring, and identifying blockchain codebase vulnerabilities. A number of firms have worked with law enforcement in the U.S. and also have contracts with groups like Europol as well. At the time of publication, there are more than 20 different blockchain intelligence businesses that work within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Some of them are well known firms like Cyphertrace, Chainalysis, and Elliptic. Other platforms are offered by Alethio, Bison Trails, Blockpit, Blockmonitor, Bloxy, Postchain, Scoreshain, Sixgill, Tibco, Credits, Crystal Blockchain, Dune analytics, Madana, Bitrank, and Ocyan are lesser-known operations.
A few of these startups have dedicated their business models to blockchain surveillance and monitoring a great number of different networks. In October 2019, Chainalysis detailed it was monitoring 21 different tokens that stem from Ethereum. That same month, the firm Ciphertrace revealed it is tracking 700 cryptocurrencies providing “visibility into 87% of the global trading volume.” Many of these companies put out research reports on the data they discover during exchange hack investigations and other types of crypto scams. Elliptic became well known A slew of blockchain surveillance firms published data after the massive Plus Token
