2024-03-15 18:34:29
Mastercard’s blockchain analytics company, CipherTrace, has shut down some of its key services over data reliability concerns.
CipherTrace, the blockchain analytics company acquired by Mastercard in 2021, is shutting down some of its key services. The California-based blockchain company appears to have suspended the following services:
- Armada, a tool that helps banks, payment providers and regulators uncover virtual currency transactions for use in risk and fraud models by assigning names and account numbers to exchanges.
- Inspector, a repository of attribution data, links crypto-addresses to real-world entities, sanctioned entities, IP addresses, and events.
- Sentry, a real-time transaction (KYT) tracking tool for anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CFT) compliance.
Scoop from yesterday: The Mastercard-owned crypto analytics firm CipherTrace has informed clients that it is shutting down its key products.
This comes following Mastercard pulled a CipherTrace expert report from a high-profile trial, citing data issues:
— Leo Schwartz (@leomschwartz) March 14, 2024
The report highlights that this latest development follows Mastercard’s decision to withdraw the expert testimony of Jonelle Still, CipherTrace’s director of investigations and intelligence, in the Bitcoin Fog case. Still previously said Chainalysis’ attributions were “unverifiable” and criticized the prosecution’s investigation as “massively flawed.”
However, Mastercard later retracted Still’s testimony, saying the data he used was “unverifiable” and came from pre-acquisition data collection practices. CipherTrace did not comment on the events.
Previous findings of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) show significant differences in the mapping of blockchain data between different on-chain analytics providers.
In July 2021, the FATF released a report comparing peer-to-peer transaction data from seven blockchain analytics firms. These included Chainalysis, CipherTrace, Coinfirm, Elliptic, Merkle Science, Scorechain and TRM Labs. The comparison highlighted significant differences in the data provided by these companies. This prompted the FATF to admit that it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions from the graphs presented.
At the same time, Sterlingov elleni perben the court called Chainalysist’s data analysis “reliable”.
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