Compliance and intelligence in the crypto market

Sanctions drive the demand for tracing

Chainalysis reported that crypto laundering reached $82 billion in 2025. This figure grew from $10 billion in 2020. The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recently sanctioned John Desmond Hanafin, a 48-year-old UAE resident from Ireland, whose firm Huriya Private FZE LLE processed more than $5.2 million in USDT since the war in Ukraine began. Hanafin worked with Yulia Sergeeva of Aquila Capital Group to move money from Russia into the UAE. An Etherscan wallet linked to his firm received a single transaction of 1,132,000 USDT. Most funds for this wallet came from Binance, Huobi, and OKX. OFAC also sanctioned Anselm Oskar Schmucki, who controls the Estonian entities Cryptovenience and CryptAnet. Chainalysis provides risk scores and continuous monitoring to block illicit actors. In 2026, 47% of organizations onboarded into the crypto space use alerting standards that would have been in the top 10% of strictness in 2020. Regulators in the US, UK, and Singapore reference Chainalysis risk scores in their compliance frameworks. Chainalysis also identifies Chinese-language money-laundering networks that processed $16.1 billion in 2025, a category that makes up 20% of the illicit ecosystem. Hanafin helped high-net-worth Russian citizens obtain passports from other countries. Cryptovenience, one of the sanctioned firms, offers plastic cards for storing and spending cryptocurrencies.

Nansen and Elliptic compete on precision

Elliptic targets compliance officers needing high signal-to-noise ratios in dark market environments. Nansen uses AI to provide behavioral signals through its database of 500 million labeled addresses. You should look at how these labels differ from raw blockchain data. Nansen’s Smart Money labels include Smart LPs, Smart Airdrop Farmers, and Smart NFT Traders. The Nansen Pro plan costs $49 per month with annual billing or $69 per month with a monthly subscription. The Nansen AI app allows users to trade perps on Hyperliquid or spot tokens on Solana and Base. Nansen’s Token God Mode dashboard updates within two minutes of new transactions.

Nansen’s Smart Money profiles identify wallets that show consistent profitability or early adoption of new projects. The Smart Money universe contains between 5,000 and 10,000 wallets. Nansen’s Wallet Profiler provides detailed analysis of an individual wallet’s entire portfolio and profit history. The "Hot Contracts" dashboard ranks contracts by recent Smart Money interactions. When the Nansen Smart Money aggregate position in a token rises, retail traders often follow in the next 1-7 days.

Arkham Intelligence and the token economy

Arkham Intelligence issued its ARKM token to beta testers and Binance launchpad participants. The token trades at $0.75 with a $113 million market cap. This follows an initial sale price of $0.05 where investors faced a maximum allocation of $15,000. Investors locked $2.4 billion in the launchpad to secure better chances at allocations. The company raised over $10 million in two equity rounds from investors including Tim Draper, Wintermute Trading, and the co-founders of Palantir and OpenAI. There are 150 million tokens in circulation, while 850 million tokens follow an eight-year vesting schedule. Some users criticized the company for including personal email addresses in referral links during an affiliate campaign. Will Arkham’s identity-based rewards model eventually force a shift toward more private, zero-knowledge identification methods?