News and Insights

What are smart contracts? A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. Smart contracts permit trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out among disparate, anonymous parties without the need for a central authority, legal system, or external enforcement mechanism. Because they…

Stablecoins maybe privately issued cryptocurrency or algorithmic or “non-collateralized/decentralized” stablecoins such as DAI, an algorithmic stablecoin issued by MakerDAO.

A Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is a document that financial institutions must file with their Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) whenever there is a suspected case of money laundering or fraud. These reports are tools to help monitor any activity within finance-related industries that is deemed out of the ordinary, a precursor of illegal activity, or…

A Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) is a document that financial institutions must file with their Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) whenever there is a suspected case of money laundering or fraud. These reports are tools to help monitor any activity within finance-related industries that is deemed out of the ordinary, a precursor of illegal activity, or…

A transaction graph is a visual representation of one or more transactions and the addresses that sent and received bitcoins. A transaction graph can show how money is transferred between users and intermediate services such as hosted wallets, exchanges or mixers. CipherTrace users can look up transactions and see the transaction graph. You can also…

A transaction is a record in the bitcoin blockchain that records the movement of bitcoins, or portions of them, from one address to another. Transactions are uniquely identified by a transaction ID. A transaction has one or more outputs. Transactions can be looked up in the CipherTrace Search screen.

In their Interpretive Letter #1172, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) defines an unhosted as “one where an individual owner of a cryptocurrency maintains control of the cryptographic keys for accessing the underlying cryptocurrency.” Also sometimes referred to as “self-hosted wallets,” “private wallets,” and “personal wallets.”

What is a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP)? A Virtual Asset Service Provider is defined by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a business that conducts one or more of the following actions on behalf of its clients: exchange between virtual assets and fiat currencies exchange between one or more forms of virtual assets…

Twitter may verify accounts that it determines to be an account of public interest. Typically this includes accounts maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas. A verified is sometimes called a “blue-tick” Twitter accounts because of the specific placement of the blue Twitter…

A wallet address is a way of grouping bitcoin addresses into one group that is likely to be controlled by a single user or by a service. These groupings may not be 100% accurate. There are a number of ways to compute wallet addresses. One way is the “multi-input clustering” method, where we analyze multi-input…