It was recently reported that Merkle Science, the premier predictive blockchain monitoring and investigative platform, would be making significant enhancements to its blockchain investigations tool. When used in conjunction with address-based forensics, Tracker can assist government authorities, crypto firms, and financial institutions in visualizing, investigating, and identifying transaction patterns that would otherwise be invisible.
Tracker’s revised features enable for forensic investigation on a cryptocurrency address or a cluster of cryptocurrency addresses at the same time, thanks to Merkle Science’s sophisticated analytics and patented algorithms. This results in improved cooperation, accuracy, and ease-of-use. In the words of Mriganka Pattnaik, Co-founder and CEO of Merkle Science, “In the last six months, we have observed an increase in demand for support in tracking crime including privacy coins, digital currency, and non-financial tokens.”
While Bitcoin was formerly the focus of the majority of crypto-crime, the largest crypto-exploitations — such as the $600 million Poly Network attack — are now DeFi-related, rendering typical blockchain research tools unable to combat the threat. Incorporating on- and off-chain intelligence, Merkle Science’s Tracker redesign heralds the beginning of a new age for our investigation tool. This will result in more efficient team collaboration.
“Through my work as a United States Attorney prosecuting financial crimes, I’ve learned the value of simple-to-use investigation tools,” said Mary Beth Buchanan, President, Americas & Global Chief Legal Officer of Merkle Science.
“Law enforcement and government agencies require investigative tools that are simple to use and accurate, as well as data and visualisations that can be independently verified in the event of a subpoena being issued. Financial institutions and cryptocurrency firms that manage thousands of crypto fraud claims require the right tools to determine whether or not the claims are legitimate, because the legitimacy of the claims has a direct impact on the bottom lines of the businesses.”
The decentralised finance market has risen by more than 800 percent in the last year, and many of the larger cryptocurrency thefts in recent months have been DeFi-related, in which smart contracts have been attacked. As criminal typologies in crypto continue to evolve, Merkle Science is constantly improving Tracker’s capabilities to ensure that it remains up to date with the issues that our users confront on a daily basis. The following are some of the most significant feature updates:
DeFi and Smart Contract-Specific Transaction Forensics and Analytics: a comprehensive solution: When tracking DeFi transactions, Tracker decodes the complicated transaction logs that are generated, allowing it to analyze the fund movements within the smart contracts. Investigators can visualize the nature of the functionalities contained within smart contracts and gain a better understanding of how they are being exploited using the tool.
In order to improve the ease of use and verifiability, we need to go beyond address-level analysis. It provides a clear, graphical picture of fund transfers across wallet clusters, which are groups of wallets that are associated with a single institution, such as a cryptocurrency exchange or a hedge fund. In order to detect entities and acquire more actionable intelligence about criminal actors, users can use cluster-based analysis to their advantage. Users can add custom tags to wallet addresses as well as off-chain information such as IP addresses, and they have the ability to remark, share, and interact with other users in order to conduct more comprehensive investigations.
Using the Auto-Investigate feature, you can reveal related entities with a single click: Tracker’s strong graph database technology enables investigators to build a map of arriving and exiting entities associated with a wallet address with a single click of a button, using only a single computer. With Merkle Science’s cutting-edge technology, even those with no prior crypto investigation or forensics technology background can benefit from its cutting-edge solutions.
In contrast to other blockchain monitoring and investigative solutions now available on the market, Merkle Science’s platform adopts a risk and behavior-based approach, resulting in more adaptive and effective investigations overall. As criminal behaviour changes, Merkle Science’s investigation and intelligence tools evolve along with it, allowing teams to take professional, evidence-based action in response to the new information they are receiving.
