Thoughts, Stories, Analysis

Blockchain forensics of the TMPL rug pull. We traced how scammers masked the trail of funds through mixer, gambling platforms, and cash out stolen ETH through exchanges.

An investigative report explaining what cryptocurrency exit scams and DeFi rug pulls are, how they are carried out, and the tracing and investigations of such crypto frauds.

Co-founder Timothy Lin is featured on Channel News Asia's "On the Red Dot" and CNA 93.8. This post contains a transcript of the radio interview and CNA's documentary footage.

We evaluated 8 different graph visualisation packages in areas spanning performance, algorithms and components

An overview of applications of network analytics in the financial services industry for fraud detection, including entity link analysis and cycle detection algorithms.

To what extent are Cryptocurrency prices being driven by institutional investors or retail traders? We explore this question and more with a deep dive into 3 on-chain metrics which investors or anyone interested in the virtual asset markets should keep track of.

An overview of how natural language processing methods (NLP) can be used to tag adverse news reports for cryptocurrency monitoring - a joint project with NUS Business Analytics students.

We present a guide to using machine learning for fraud detection, going through the advantages of ML vs rule-based methods, use cases and some important considerations to keep in mind when adopting such an approach.

FinCEN has taken action against Larry Dean Harmon, founder and operator of bitcoin mixing service Helix and Coin Ninja for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. What can we learn about how suspicious entities operate and what do these guidelines mean to exchanges operating in the United States?

Structuring of Funds. Use of Mixers / Tumblers. Doctored identities. What are the AML red flags that you should be aware of? A summary of money laundering and terrorist financing indiciators highlighted by the FATF.

More than 2,000 suspicious transaction reports filed by nearly 90 financial institutions were leaked. We go through what are SARs, discuss the broader implications, analyse a sample dataset made public and share our thoughts on what it takes to fix the problem.

The G20 TechSprint initiative, aims to highlight the potential for technologies to resolve regulatory compliance and supervisory challenges. Team Cylynx is shortlisted as one of the finalists in the problem statement of monitoring AML/CFT risks on crypto assets.

Blockchain forensics of the Upbit hack. We traced how the Upbit hackers concealed the origin of funds and cash out stolen ETH through exchanges.

The structure of a blockchain fits very naturally into a graph representation, with addresses being the nodes and transactions being the edges of a graph. By modelling the blockchain as a graph, we can get a comprehensive view of the activities that are on-going and how the different entities are related to each other.

Being the central gateway in the cryptocurrency world, it is surprising how little work has been done to characterise the structure of exchanges. This includes their governance structure, how they receive funds and carry-out transactions on behalf of their users. In this post, we analyse the structure of exchanges on the ethereum chain