Bitcoin Forensic Analysis Uncovers Money Laundering Clusters and Criminal Proceeds
Clusters linked to illegal activity and money laundering have been found through forensic examination of a graph dataset containing transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. This includes the discovery of criminal proceeds transferred to a cryptocurrency exchange and wallets affiliated with a Russian darknet market that were previously unidentified.
The results were produced by Elliptic in association with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
The co-authors wrote in a report shared with The Hacker News that the 26 GB dataset, nicknamed Elliptic2, is a huge graph dataset featuring 122K annotated subgraphs of Bitcoin clusters within a background graph consisting of 49M node clusters and 196M edge transactions.
Elliptic2 expands upon the Elliptic Data Set (also known as Elliptic1), a public tra...