Chainalysis

Peter Todd

@peterktodd

Insane detail from the Roman Sterlingov @chainalysis case: the prosecutors introduced 100% fake evidence into the case. They claimed that a screenshot was a chat written by Roman. But they knew that it was actually from a ebook they Roman didn't write. Someone should have been executed for this absolute criminal fraud against the justice system. Of course, nothing happened at all.

Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡

@shanaka86

BREAKING: The IRGC toll booth at the Strait of Hormuz right now accepts three currencies: cash, yuan, and cryptocurrency. The third one is the one that keeps sanctions lawyers awake at night. Because the third one moves at the speed of light through rails that no government on Earth fully controls. The Financial Times and Lloyd’s List confirmed that payments for the $2 million per-tanker toll are accepted in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. The dominant crypto rail, per Chainalysis reporting on IRGC flows, is USDT on the Tron blockchain. The reason is mechanical: Tron settles in approximately 3 seconds per block, charges negligible fees, and operates with limited identity verification on many access points. A $2 million stablecoin transfer can be initiated, confirmed, and received before a sanctions compliance officer finishes reading the transaction alert. The IRGC’s crypto architecture is not improvised. Chainalysis documented over $3 billion in IRGC-linked USDT flows in 2025 alone, used for sanctions evasion, oil settlement, and proxy funding across Hezbollah and Houthi networks. The Hormuz toll gate is the latest application of an infrastructure that was already operational before the first missile was fired. The war did not create the crypto rail. The war gave it a chokepoint to monetise. The United States has responded with targeted sanctions. OFAC has designated dozens of IRGC-linked Tron addresses. Tether has frozen identified wallets. But the disruption rate, per Chainalysis estimates, remains approximately 10 to 20 percent of identifiable flows. The gap between identification and enforcement is structural. The IRGC uses layered transfers through multiple addresses, cross-chain bridges to other networks, over-the-counter desks in jurisdictions beyond US reach, and integration with yuan settlement channels for larger state-linked transactions. Each layer adds obfuscation. Each bridge adds jurisdiction. Each OTC desk adds deniability. The 3-second block time means the funds have moved before the freeze order arrives. Behind the crypto toll, a parallel rail operates at the state level. Russia’s digital ruble and China’s e-CNY are being used in bilateral trade with Iran for oil and fertiliser settlement on sovereign, permissioned blockchains that sit entirely outside US jurisdiction. These are not decentralised networks. They are centrally controlled ledgers operated by the Russian Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China. The United States cannot sanction a sovereign central bank’s own ledger. It cannot freeze a digital ruble that never touches a US-regulated rail. The CBDC channel handles the larger, slower, state-to-state flows. The USDT channel handles the tactical, fast, deniable flows. Together they form a two-tier payment system that bypasses the dollar from both the top and the bottom. This is the war’s financial dimension that almost nobody is covering. The kinetic war degrades launchers and flattens headquarters. The energy war closes the strait and blocks fertiliser. The financial war builds a parallel payment system under live fire that may outlast the conflict itself. The yuan toll collects at the gate. The USDT transfer settles in 3 seconds. The digital ruble clears between Moscow and Tehran on a ledger Washington cannot read. And the dollar, which has governed energy settlement since 1974, watches from the other side of the strait where 400 ships are waiting and none of them are paying in greenbacks. The molecules are trapped. The money is not. And the money that moves through the toll booth is building the infrastructure that the molecules will use when the strait finally reopens, in a currency that is no longer the dollar. Full analysis: https://t.co/iFmUcarGdV

Sumit Gupta (CoinDCX)

@smtgpt

Orange pill update on @nikhilkamathcio: the podcast trailer is live. 🟠 I just saw it. He asks @brian_armstrong if India is really the world's #1 crypto country and admits he doesn't see the impact of crypto in his day-to-day life. After 8 years of running @CoinDCX, I can humbly say otherwise. I see the impact of crypto every day. → So do the users I've met across cities and towns in India. 100 million+ Indians now own crypto. It is the largest user base in the world, and 7 in 10 of them are under 35. → So does the data on our dashboards. Indians started 5.7 lakh+ new crypto SIPs on CoinDCX last year, most first time users beginning at under ₹500 a month. → So does Chainalysis, which has ranked India #1 in global adoption 3 years back-to-back: $338 billion in crypto value received in a single year, ahead in every category: retail, institutional, even DeFi. And that's the beauty of India's crypto story. It's not loud. Some changes are quiet: ₹500 SIPs, small towns, first-time investors. Anyway, good to see crypto becoming part of the mainstream conversation. Will be interesting to see the full episode.

Eli5DeFi

@Eli5defi

We have $31B tokenized assets on-chain, but only ~$3B (~10%) actually moves in DeFi TVL. The rest sits minted in wallets with almost no velocity. — ➠ The Numbers Right Now ▸ Total ex-stablecoins >$31B, +50% YTD. US Treasuries and private credit drove it. Institutions and DAOs rotating reserves (Sky still holds ~$1.5B in BUIDL; Ethena put $250M into a Securitize AAA CLO). ▸ New capital signal @chainalysis saw ~400k addresses receive their first RWA token within a week of wallet creation. These had zero prior on-chain history. ▸ Activity level Top treasuries (BUIDL, WTGXX, BENJI) average <30 transfers per month. Private credit and real estate lag hardest on both holders and movement. ▸ 94% still USD-denominated. Even the remaining 6% is mostly Spiko euro T-bills. Traditional fixed income is ~45% non-USD. — ➠ Why Value Stays Upstream A lot of “tokenized” real‑world assets aren’t truly plug‑and‑play for open DeFi. ❶  Compliance and access limits block open use Most of these assets come with identity checks (KYC), rules about who can hold them, limits on transfers, or redemptions that take a long time. That makes them hard to use in permissionless DeFi apps. Because of that friction, the companies that issue the assets (the platforms creating them) capture most of the value, and the DeFi protocols that want to use them end up competing for whatever small opportunity is left. -- ❷ Pricing mechanics make them bad collateral Many products only update their official value (NAV) once per day. Market makers don’t like trading something when the “real” price is stale, so they widen their bid/ask spreads to protect themselves. Wide spreads lead to: - Lower loan-to-value (LTV) ratios in lending markets (because collateral is harder to price safely) - Worse leverage and “leveraged yield” strategies (because entry/exit costs are high and liquidation risk rises) The proposed fix is better oracle and risk infrastructure (services like @chainlink, @PythNetwork, @redstone_defi, and @CredoraNetwork) so prices and risk can be updated more reliably and more frequently. -- ❸ Redemptions still cost time and money Even when a product is considered relatively liquid, cashing out can be expensive or slow. Example: swapping out of Ondo USDY can cost around 0.2–0.3% in slippage even on a $1,000 trade. Because of this, many users act as if redemptions settle in a day or two (T+1/T+2) instead of expecting instant exits. One approach to improve this is @symbioticfi’s “Liquid Lane” RFQ (request‑for‑quote) vaults → market makers compete to offer better pricing (smaller discounts) for redemptions, while liquidity providers can still earn lending yield using the same capital. -- ❹ Vertically integrated players have an advantage If one company controls the whole pipeline → creating the loans/assets, running the marketplace where they trade, and providing the settlement currency → they can make the system work more smoothly and keep more of the economics. For example, @Figure controls origination (over $21B in HELOCs on Provenance), secondary trading and price discovery (a Dutch auction marketplace) and Settlement — ➥ Final Thoughts Tokenized commodities already sit at $4.8B with $90.7B Q1 2026 volume. Equities crossed $1B and 185k holders in a year. The missing piece is yield and collateral utility layered on top and the protocol that turns price exposure into productive, composable positions first will own the long-term holders. Institutions brought the assets. Crypto-native infrastructure wins if it solves pricing, redemption, and composability that institutions cannot paper over with their own balance sheets. NFA. DYOR.

Dominic(evm/acc)💭

@0xD0M_

the stable-coin market just crossed $314b. on the dashboard everyone screenshots, almost all of it is dollar Usd, that hides the fastest-growing corner of the whole sector, and it isn't USD. without the Usd you find out local-currency stable-coins: the euro, the Brazilian real, the singapore dollar, the yen. i know the basket is small, but it has about $1.1b in supply as of february. the growth is the point i want ya'll to see. supply is up roughly 90% year over year, versus 42% for USD stable coins. transfer volume is up about 16x since 2025. holders went from 40,000 to over 1.2 million. why does nobody see it? well maybe because the default tool doesn't show it. @DefiLlama 's stable-coin page reads as basically 100% usd. to find the non-dollar market you have to go to dune or @artemis. here is what it actually is, the euro runs the group. solana:HzwqbKZw8HxMN6bF2yFZNrht3c2iXXzpKcFu7uBEDKtr is over 80% of supply, pushed by mica clarity in europe. brazil's real, $brla, is up 8x year over year, wired into pix, the country's instant payment system. the singapore dollar, $xsgd, and the yen, $jpyc, are small but accelerating on regulatory green lights. and most of this is not even on-chain in defi. excluding $eurc, about 80% of it is plain transfers, payroll, and settlement, how can you tell: volume dips on weekends, the way business payments do. the usual line is that stable-coins are a dollar tool for cross-border remittances. the data says the opposite. cross-border's share of payments is falling, from about half to roughly a quarter, while same-country use rises. people are paying each other inside the same country, in their own currency. if you pull raw "non-usd stable-coin volume," a big chunk in some datasets is ethereum:0x6fa0be17e4bea2fcfa22ef89bf8ac9aab0ab0fc9 , a ruble-linked token that is sanctioned by the us, uk, and eu and blocked on uniswap. @chainalysis tied about $72b of roughly $93b in 2025 sanctioned-entity flows to it. that is sanctions plumbing, not organic payments. the clean market is the ~$1.1b basket. mixing them inflates the number and kills credibility of currency stable-coins. the euro coins are still only 0.3% of the stable-coin market. if they reach even low single digits, that's tens of billions showing up in a category of defi nobody is watching. so my question now is why what unlocks it first, the regulation or the liquidity? why is nobody talking about currency stable-coins, most importantly are there defi protocols that are building in that sector that are innovative or we are waiting on a16z to point the way?

Criptolawyer

@criptolawyer

most neobanks will not survive the next 18 months. not because demand disappears. $245M in top-ups in a single week proves demand is the least of your problems, they will die because of what they built underneath: i review compliance infrastructure for a living since 2017. here is the full map of what actually holds this market together, layer by layer, and who is powering each one right now cards your card program is a three-party compliance relationship: you, your issuer, and the network. the network's enhanced due diligence sits on top of your issuer's requirements. if either loses confidence in your stack, the card stops. not slowly. overnight @binance lost Visa in Europe July 2023. lost @Mastercard in latam two months later. gone by December. @ready_co gave non-EEA users one hour's notice in June 2026 when their issuer relationship broke. one hour what the network actually wants to see: account-level OFAC and sanctions screening, not batch, not periodic, continuous. a transaction monitoring system that produces real alerts. a KYC layer defensible across every jurisdiction you operate in. one audit trail running through every product the customer touches Starlingbank had a system that produced zero individual sanctions alerts for six months. £29M fine. that is the floor the infrastructure powering this layer right now: @raincards (Visa and Mastercard principal member, BIN sponsor for 200+ programs, one API for issuance, compliance, FX and onchain settlement), @pomelo_latam ($160M raised, powers bbva , santander , @Bancolombia , @WesternUnion , Binance across latam, just launched global stablecoin card across 150+ countries), @marqeta ($383B processing volume in 2025), @lithic, @GalileoFintech, @unit_co_, @treasuryprime, @Adyen, @Stablecoin @eldoradoio @Uglycash the compliance layer that makes the issuer relationship survivable is what @blend_money is built around: screening, audit trails, per-jurisdiction reporting, the infrastructure that keeps the card program intact at scale on and off ramps every ramp is a compliance event before it's a UX event on-ramp: you are opening a new account. source of funds, identity verification, risk scoring before a single dollar moves off-ramp: withdrawal with a clean audit trail, documented source of funds, per-jurisdiction reporting. this is where most teams underinvest because users don't see it. regulators do best practice: per-account screening on every transaction, not customer-level screening on signup and never again. your banking partner will pull a sample during their quarterly review. if the trail isn't clean per transaction, you find out at the worst moment the infrastructure powering ramps right now: @moonpay (eliminated fees on stablecoin onramps, enterprise stablecoin services live), @Transak (published the Q2 2026 compliance cliff report, most serious public documentation of what payment companies need before july), @Stablecoin (acquired by Stripe for $1.1B, trust charter approved february 2026), @belo_app @AlchemyPay, zerohashx, @Bitso , @RipioApp @daimo @dakota_xyz @RampNetwork @tazapay earn (im biased here just a little bit) the most misunderstood compliance surface in the stack shared vaults feel like a product architecture decision. they are actually a legal structure decision. commingled user funds create fiduciary exposure, insolvency complexity, and a direct failure point in any serious institutional diligence process the question that kills shared vault structures is simple: show me the ledger entry for user X's balance. if the answer requires reconstructing it from pool accounting, you don't have an answer best practice: isolated per user from day one. each account its own ledger entry. yield calculated individually. never commingled. this isn't conservative. it's the only structure that survives the question above from a banking partner, a regulator, or an institutional LP doing diligence on your cap table this is the architecture @blend_money runs. isolated accounts, clean ledger, never commingled for the institutional layer on top: @noon_capital brings the DeFi stack diversification and insurance coverage that makes yield products viable for institutions. diversified protocol exposure across @MorphoLabs, @eulerfinance, @pendle_fi, tokenized treasuries, CLOs and private credit. insurance gating on every deployment, no capital deployed without coverage. that is the version that survives institutional diligence the broader earn infrastructure: @opentrade_io (RWA-backed yield-as-a-service, bank-grade legal structure with bankruptcy-remote SPC, powers Littio, Kredete, Criptan), @OndoFinance, @maplefinance, @goldfinch_fi, @SuperstateInc in europe, MiCA Article 50 prohibits interest on euro-denominated stablecoins. the compliant path runs through tokenized T-bills and RWA wrappers. yield from an underlying asset, not from the stablecoin itself. whoever builds this first owns european earn cashback and rewards every rewards program with monetary value has reporting obligations (ps @itstuyo set the new standart here: buy now pay maybe) the cleanest structure: rewards funded from interchange revenue, paid in a regulated stablecoin, accounting that reconciles per user per period, tax-reportable from day one in every jurisdiction paying rewards in your own token introduces volatility risk for the user and securities classification risk for you. the question "is this a security?" becomes harder to answer the moment the token fluctuates and users expect returns compliance screening, the layer underneath all of it most teams assemble this reactively. something breaks, a regulator asks a question, a banking partner flags a transaction. then the compliance stack gets built. that is the wrong order the teams that survive build it preventively. before the card. before the ramp. before the earn product. one continuous audit trail across every product the customer touches the point tools doing parts of this well: @chainalysis (blockchain analytics, OFAC and sanctions screening, regulator-accepted in US, EU and UK), @elliptic, @trmlabs, @Sumsubcom (KYC, AML and Travel Rule in one integration, MiCA and FATF ready), @ComplyAdvantage, @notabene_id, @sardine, @unit21inc, @jumio, @Onfido but point tools create point gaps. your KYC vendor does not talk to your transaction monitoring. your transaction monitoring does not feed your sanctions screening. your sanctions screening does not generate the audit trail your banking partner needs to read. every gap is a reconciliation problem you find at the worst moment what @blend_money built is the integrated layer. AML screening, OFAC checks, KYC, transaction monitoring, per-jurisdiction reporting, all running together as preventive infrastructure before a single user touches a product. not a compliance dashboard bolted on top. the foundation the card, the ramp and the earn product sit on IDmerit's February 2026 breach of approximately 1 billion records made this clear: your compliance infrastructure is now a counterparty risk decision, not just a regulatory one the right order of operations 1) screening and transaction monitoring, then issuer relationship, then card 2) source of funds framework, then ramp, then volume 3) isolated ledger, then earn product, then institutional partners 4)interchange accounting, then rewards, then retention teams that invert this order ship faster in year one and rebuild in year two. sometimes year two doesn't come the $245M is not a card story. it's not a yield story. it's a survival story the neobanks still standing when this market hits $2.45B will be the ones that figured out compliance is not the last thing you build. it's the only thing that lets you build everything else WaveCrest taught this lesson in 2018. Wirecard taught it in 2020. Ftx in 2022. Binance in 2023. Ready in 2026 the lesson does not change. only the names do.

Jonathan Levin

Co-founder & CEO

Co-founded Chainalysis in 2014 and became chief executive in December 2024.

Michael Gronager

Co-founder & former CEO

Co-founded Chainalysis and led it as CEO for a decade before departing in 2024; also co-founded Kraken.

Will LaForest

Chief Customer Officer

Previously at Confluent · Vienna, Virginia, United States

Joined Jun 2026

Previously at Zoom · Greater Philadelphia

Joined May 2026

Geraldine Pacheco

Senior Account Executive

Previously at Movantis · Miami, Florida, United States

Joined May 2026