Chainalysis Inks Deal With Europol and Raises $1.6m Seed Round

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Richard Kastelein
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Chainalysis, a New York based cyber security startup, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) on collaborating to fight online crime. The signing of the MoU coincides with Chainalysis completing their $1.6m seed finance round led by Point Nine Capital. Techstars, Digital Currency Group, Funders Club, and Converge VP also participated in the round. This marks a major milestone in connecting regulated finance with open public ledgers.

Blockchain, the technology pioneered by Bitcoin, has been identified as having major disruptive potential in many different applications and industries. However, this excitement has been challenged by negative headlines where digital currencies have been connected to fraud and cybercrime. As described in a report by Europol last year, cybercrime is becoming a large business with criminals leveraging different aspects of cloud infrastructure and often extorting their victims in Bitcoin.

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As the first blockchain business to connect the operations of major financial institutions to a public blockchain, Chainalysis plans to expand its regulatory technology platform to enable more companies to safely transact on a blockchain. Straddling the edge between privacy and transparency, Jonathan Levin, cofounder of Chainalysis, said:

“We believe in a future of protecting civil liberties without sacrificing our right to privacy. Enabling regulation through greater transparency, will have much larger consequences beyond just financial transactions.”

Chainalysis aims to change this through tracking digital identities on the blockchain. Their software detects suspicious activity in real time and provides investigation tools for law enforcement to tackle cybercrime. The MoU between Europol and Chainalysis on collaboration and information sharing to tackle cybercrime, is an important step which brings cutting edge private sector technology into public efforts in the fight against cybercriminals.

As put by Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis:

“We have worked extensively with regulated entities and law enforcement agencies in US, Asia, and Europe to help protect people and businesses from cybercrime attacks. This new collaboration is an important next step in the endeavour to move digital currencies out of the hands of the criminals and into the hands of consumers and blooming commerce.”

And Steven Wilson, Head of Europol’s EC3 added:

“Chainalysis brings a level of expertise that will be of significant benefit to ourEurope-wide investigations. I look forward to developing a rewarding partnership that will make the people and businesses of Europesafer online.”

This collaboration follows the recent announcement of Chainalysis’ contract with Barclays to use Chainalysis’ compliance tools to enable banks to interact with businesses that transact on the blockchain and meet their compliance requirements. The majority of  banks have thus far, been unable to safely interact with Bitcoin companies, but now Chainalysis enables banks to provide services to companies that conduct commerce on the blockchain. This is facilitated by leveraging the blockchain to provide banks with reports on measures of activity of each company that the bank onboards. This gives banks greater visibility into the risk of banking these services compared to businesses that do not operate on the blockchain.

 

About Richard Kastelein

Founder and publisher of industry publication Blockchain News (EST 2015), a partner at ICO services collective Token.Agency ($750m+ and 90+ ICOs and STOs), director of education company Blockchain Partners (Oracle Partner) – Vancouver native Richard Kastelein is an award-winning publisher, innovation executive and entrepreneur. He sits on the advisory boards of some two dozen Blockchain startups and has written over 1500 articles on Blockchain technology and startups at Blockchain News and has also published pioneering articles on ICOs in Harvard Business Review and Venturebeat. Irish Tech News put him in the top 10 Token Architects in Europe.

Kastelein has an Ad Honorem - Honorary Ph.D. and is Chair Professor of Blockchain at China's first Blockchain University in Nanchang at the Jiangxi Ahead Institute of Software and Technology. In 2018 he was invited to and attended University of Oxford's Saïd Business School for Business Automation 4.0 programme.  Over a half a decade experience judging and rewarding some 1000+ innovation projects as an EU expert for the European Commission's SME Instrument programme as a startup assessor and as a startup judge for the UK government's Innovate UK division.

Kastelein has spoken (keynotes & panels) on Blockchain technology in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Beijing, Brussels, Bucharest, Dubai, Eindhoven, Gdansk, Groningen, the Hague, Helsinki, London (5x), Manchester, Minsk, Nairobi, Nanchang, Prague, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara (2x), Shanghai, Singapore (3x), Tel Aviv, Utrecht, Venice, Visakhapatnam, Zwolle and Zurich.

He is a Canadian (Dutch/Irish/English/Métis) whose writing career has ranged from the Canadian Native Press (Arctic) to the Caribbean & Europe. He's written occasionally for Harvard Business Review, Wired, Venturebeat, The Guardian and Virgin.com, and his work and ideas have been translated into Dutch, Greek, Polish, German and French. A journalist by trade, an entrepreneur and adventurer at heart, Kastelein's professional career has ranged from political publishing to TV technology, boatbuilding to judging startups, skippering yachts to marketing and more as he's travelled for nearly 30 years as a Canadian expatriate living around the world. In his 20s, he sailed around the world on small yachts and wrote a series of travel articles called, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seas' travelling by hitching rides on yachts (1989) in major travel and yachting publications. He currently lives in Groningen, Netherlands where he's raising three teenage daughters with his wife and sailing partner, Wieke Beenen.

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