The latest trends & technologies in crypto crime

This is an interview with Jonathan Levin, the co-founder and CEO of Chainalysis, a leading blockchain data platform used by over 1,500  government agencies and financial institutions to track cryptocurrency transactions and combat illicit activity conducted by Selva Ozelli exclusively for crypto.news. Jonathan Levin officially assumed the role of CEO in December 2024, succeeding fellow co-founder Michael Gronager.

Under his leadership, Chainalysis has recently focused on expanding its presence in regions like Tel Aviv and Dubai, while ramping up M&A activity with acquisitions like Transposer, Nash, Hexagate, and Alterya. Before becoming CEO, Levin served as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) for nearly a decade, leading strategic initiatives, regulatory outreach, and government affairs.

Prior to Chainalysis, he co-founded and served as CEO of Coinometrics, which provided some of the industry’s first blockchain intelligence dashboards. Levin is a prominent voice in the cryptocurrency industry, frequently providing expert insights to policymakers. 

He has testified before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee multiple times, most recently in July 2025, regarding the role of digital assets in illicit finance. He is a mentor for the Techstars Alchemist Blockchain accelerator and frequently appears on TV, on platforms like C-SPAN, to discuss blockchain security and adoption.

1. Tell us about your educational and career path that led you to working at Chainalysis

I studied economics at Oxford, where I got obsessed with a simple question: how do financial systems actually evolve, and what role does data play in making them work?

I got into Bitcoin early — not as a speculator, but as someone fascinated by the economics of it. Here was a transparent financial system, every transaction visible on a public ledger, and yet almost nobody could interpret what was actually happening. Crypto businesses couldn’t get bank accounts because they had no way to demonstrate compliance. Law enforcement couldn’t trace funds. Regulators couldn’t assess risk.

That gap — between transparency in theory and opacity in practice — was the founding insight. Together with my co-founders, we realized that whoever built the data and intelligence layer for blockchains would become essential infrastructure. That’s what Chainalysis became.

What’s changed since then is the scale of the opportunity. Ten years ago, we were explaining what blockchain was. Today, we’re building the trust layer for a world where AI agents will be transacting autonomously on-chain. The core problem — making sense of complex financial flows and identifying risk — hasn’t changed. But the speed, volume, and sophistication of what we need to analyze have increased by orders of magnitude. 

2. Tell us about the vision that led to the establishment of Chainalysis

We founded Chainalysis in 2014 because we saw that blockchain technology had a trust problem — and that trust problem was a data problem.

The catalyst was Mt. Gox. In early 2014, the largest crypto exchange collapsed after 650,000 bitcoins were stolen. It was a transparent system — every transaction was on a public ledger — but nobody could interpret what had happened. Funds were moving, and there was no reliable way to trace them.

So, we built the tools. We analyzed the Mt. Gox flows and determined that the exchange’s hot wallet keys had been compromised years earlier, with funds siphoned steadily over time. That work contributed to the identification and arrest of Alexander Vinnik, who was charged with laundering stolen funds through BTC-e.

That case proved the thesis: if crypto was going to scale, it needed infrastructure for trust. Not just compliance checkboxes — real intelligence that could support investigations, protect consumers, and give institutions the confidence to participate.

3. Tell us about Chainalysis’s technology and business model for tracing digital assets on blockchains.

At the core, we’re a data company. We take raw blockchain data from across networks and transform it into actionable intelligence — grouping related addresses, applying proprietary analysis, and combining on-chain data with off-chain information to link activity to real-world entities.

That intelligence powers everything. Investigators use it to build cases and trace funds across wallets and chains. Compliance teams use it to monitor activity, screen counterparties, and manage exposure to sanctioned or high-risk entities. The results are measurable — our tools have helped freeze or recover over $34 billion in illicit funds.

Anyone can build a dashboard. What can’t be replicated is the proprietary data we’ve built over a decade — the entity mappings, the behavioral models, the relationships with governments and institutions in 60+ countries that feed our intelligence. Independent researchers at TU Delft evaluated blockchain analytics providers and found our data had the highest accuracy, broadest coverage, and lowest false-positive rates. 

Where this is heading is equally important. We’ve recently introduced blockchain intelligence agents — AI-powered capabilities built on top of our data platform. These agents can analyze complex transaction flows, enrich alerts, and generate investigative leads in minutes instead of hours. They’re not generic AI tools — they’re grounded in our proprietary data and designed for regulated environments where explainability and auditability are non-negotiable.

The way I think about it: our data is the foundation, the platform delivers it, and increasingly, AI agents are the interface. We’re moving from a world where humans query our platform to one where AI agents work alongside investigators and compliance teams, scaling expertise across entire organizations.

4. Can Chainalysis trace mixer coins or privacy-focused coins?

While we don’t disclose the specific techniques we use to analyze mixers or privacy-enhancing technologies, we can say that blockchain transparency still provides meaningful investigative leads.

5. Chainalysis is heavily used by world financial regulators and public and private institutions to ensure compliance with Financial Action Task Force (FAFT) standards. Tell us about Chainalysis’s customers and services.

We serve more than 1,500 customers globally — government agencies, regulators, law enforcement, financial institutions, crypto businesses, and increasingly, enterprises that are engaging with digital assets for the first time.

The common thread is that every one of these organizations needs to operate with confidence in an environment that’s evolving fast. We provide a blockchain intelligence platform that combines large-scale on-chain data with advanced analytics to help them investigate illicit activity, manage risk, and meet regulatory obligations.

Ultimately, our role is to provide the infrastructure that enables organizations to engage with crypto confidently while protecting consumers and the broader financial system.

6. Does Chainalysis get hired by individuals who have been hacked?  If not, who should individual investors who have been harmed by crypto crime turn to?

We work with public- and private-sector organizations, not individuals directly. If someone suspects they’ve been hacked, the most important thing is speed — contact local law enforcement immediately and notify any platforms involved, such as exchanges or wallet providers. The faster you act, the better the chances of tracing and potentially recovering funds.

What I’d add is that the tools available to law enforcement have gotten dramatically better. A decade ago, tracing stolen crypto was a manual, painstaking process. Today, with AI-powered investigative tools, agencies can follow complex fund flows across chains and through obfuscation techniques much faster than before. That’s a meaningful shift in the odds for victims.

7. FATF cites Chainalysis report indicating that in 2025, illicit digital asset activity reached a record high of approximately $154–$158 billion, with Stablecoins used in majority of these illicit transactions.  Tell us about your report’s findings and why Stablecoins?

Our latest Crypto Crime Report, which analyzes activity in 2025, shows that illicit transaction volume reached approximately $154–$158 billion. While that figure reflects the continued evolution of the threat landscape, it’s important to note that illicit activity still accounts for a very small share of total crypto transaction volume.

On stablecoins specifically — this isn’t surprising, and it shouldn’t be alarming in the way people might initially read it. Stablecoins have become the dominant medium for on-chain transactions, period. They’re fast, they’re stable, they’re efficient for cross-border movement. So of course, illicit actors use them — they use whatever the market uses. That’s always been the pattern.

The good news is every transaction is on a public ledger. The issuers can freeze assets. The data trail is rich. So, while the shift to stablecoins creates new challenges in terms of volume and speed, it also creates enormous opportunities for detection and disruption — if you have the right data and the right tools. That’s where we come in.

The real question isn’t “why stablecoins?” — it’s “are we building the intelligence infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with how quickly value is moving on-chain?” That’s what we’re focused on.

8. What are the latest trends in crypto crime?

Three things stand out to me.

First, nation-states. This is no longer a fringe concern. In 2025, we saw state actors — and I’m talking about sophisticated, well-resourced governments — systematically leveraging blockchain infrastructure to evade sanctions and move funds at scale. This is a fundamentally different threat than a ransomware gang or a darknet market. It requires a fundamentally different level of intelligence to counter.

Second, professionalization. Crypto crime has industrialized. You now have service-based ecosystems — laundering-as-a-service, infrastructure providers, brokers — that function like the back office of a criminal enterprise. It mirrors what happened in traditional financial crime over decades, but it’s happening on a compressed timeline because the technology moves faster.

Third — and this is one of the most significant findings in our 2026 report — the rise of Chinese-language money-laundering networks. These networks processed $16.1 billion in illicit crypto in 2025. That’s roughly $44 million a day across nearly 1,800 wallets, and they now facilitate around 20% of known illicit crypto laundering globally. They operate through forums, Telegram channels, and escrow-style marketplaces, and they’ve become the connective tissue linking disparate forms of cybercrime worldwide. This is not a regional problem — it’s a global infrastructure problem.

The throughline across all three trends is scale and speed. The criminals are scaling. The question is whether the defenders — governments, financial institutions, platforms — are scaling their intelligence capabilities at the same rate. That’s the race we’re in.

9. Chainalysis recently announced the first blockchain intelligence agents designed to help organizations and investigators keep pace with the explosive rise of AI-enabled crypto crime.  Tell us more about this.

This is one of the most important things we’ve done as a company, and it connects directly to where we see the entire market heading.

Let me frame the problem first. AI has fundamentally changed the economics of crypto crime. It’s lowered the barrier to entry, it’s increased the speed and sophistication of attacks, and it’s enabled criminal operations to scale in ways that weren’t possible even two years ago. Scams that used to require human operators can now be automated. Social engineering that used to target individuals can now target thousands simultaneously. The attack surface has exploded.

The defense side has to evolve just as fast — and honestly, faster. That’s what our blockchain intelligence agents are about.

These aren’t chatbots bolted onto a dashboard. They’re AI agents built on top of our proprietary data — more than a decade of blockchain intelligence, attribution, and investigative expertise — designed to work alongside human investigators and compliance teams. They can trace complex transaction flows, enrich alerts, identify patterns, and surface actionable intelligence in minutes instead of hours or days. And critically, every output is auditable and explainable. In regulated environments, that’s non-negotiable.

What makes this defensible is the data. You can build an AI agent on top of public data and get a mediocre result. You build it on top of the deepest, most comprehensive blockchain intelligence dataset in the world — which is what we have — and you get something that actually works at the level these problems demand. The data is the moat. The agents are how we make that moat accessible to every analyst, every investigator, every compliance officer, regardless of their level of blockchain expertise.

This is also a window into where we’re heading more broadly. We’re entering an era where agents — not just criminal agents, but legitimate commercial agents — will be transacting autonomously on-chain. The volume, speed, and complexity of on-chain activity is going to increase by orders of magnitude. Human-only workflows won’t keep up. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that pair human judgment with AI-powered intelligence. That’s what we’re building toward.

10. How can people reach you?

You can learn more about Chainalysis and our work at chainalysis.com, where we regularly publish research and insights.