Bitfury has announced the launch of a new tool designed to investigate the Bitcoin Blockchain for suspicious activity, 'Crystal', according to a company press release.
Bitfury is live from London at the 4th annual AML, Financial Crime & Sanctions Forum! We are presenting our Analytics solutions, Crystal, to EU leaders and investigators. pic.twitter.com/gVrHK6wWWA
— The Bitfury Group (@BitfuryGroup) January 30, 2018
Crystal will allow law enforcement organisations to track Bitcoin transactions and connect them to their real-world origins, so that they can "determine relationships between criminal actors, and by financial and other institutions engaged in compliance and due diligence activities."
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The new system works by using analytics and data scraping to create a risk score to aid those that track suspicious behaviour on the blockchain. As it will be able to identify Bitcoin wallet ownership and connections between entities using the blockchain, it will "provide substantial evidence for use by financial investigators," according to the release.
Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury Group, said: “Unfortunately, there are people who exploit public blockchains and take advantage of their pseudonymity to commit crimes. Bitfury’s new Crystal tool will make it much easier to identify and track criminal activities on the blockchain."
The software took two years to develop, according to the official website. It offers autonomous tracking, meaning that within hours users can trace a single transaction back to its source, and be notified of the result via email. Crystal Pro is a version of the software designed for internal use within an organisation.
BitFury Group is a San Fransico-based company, founded in 2011. It began as a Bitcoin mining operation, and has since expanded to become a provider of the hardware and software that makes up the infrastructure of a blockchain.
In July 2017, it released Exonum, an enterprise-grade blockchain which can handle up to 3,000 transactions a second. In December, it announced a partnership with mining company Hut 8 to set up probably the biggest mining centre in North America.
