Elliptic

So really interesting interview series there.

Next up from Elliptic, regulators have made AI agent governance part of your job.

What are you going to do and what's expected of you? So Elliptic has a course which will give you a certificate on AI agent governance, and that's what they're peddling.

But they really, I think... lay out for you what the EU requires in terms of AI literacy.

And each agent is left to the individual institution's own risk management.

Investigators also identified another eighty-nine suspected fraud victims in Ghana, with reported losses amounting to about eight point three million dollars.

This operation involved several private sector partners, including major cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, as well as blockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs.

What role did these companies play in the crackdown?

These firms were instrumental in tracing payments and accounts.

I'm Tom Keatinge, director of the Center for Finance and Security at Brucie.

And in this latest episode of the STR podcast, I'm joined by Dr. Tom Robinson, chief scientist and founder of blockchain analytics company Elliptic.

We discuss who's behind A7A5, why Kyrgyzstan matters, the role of the Russian state and why A7A5 increasingly appears to function as a bridge into the much more liquid dollar-backed stablecoin USDT Tether.

And crucially, we ask whether this new financial infrastructure really makes sanctions evasion easier or whether actually the transparency of the blockchain creates new opportunities to disrupt it that Western policymakers must take.

I just love the way the old fashioned stuff is mixing with the modern.

And this is a great example of that symbiosis.

Now, at Elliptic, you've done a bunch of work looking at A7A5 and how it's performing and all the rest of it.

We've talked about the fact that this is now an increasingly heavily sanctioned ecosystem.

In other words, moving money outside of basically the scrutiny of governments.

Bitcoin.com also reported that Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson observed transfers collapsing after the first strike.

And according to the reporting, the issuer's exchange service had been hosted by Yandex.

The report also describes service problems as some continuing transactions.

So for the record, this does indicate some cryptocurrency disruption, but that is a super qualified statement here.

Also, Elliptic documented a severe decline months before the attacks.

Therefore, the Ukrainian strikes cannot explain the token's entire financial deterioration.

And nothing in any of the evidence that I could find establishes a connection to President Trump.

This is like Justice League all hands call.

Adobe, Binance, Coinbase, Cyjax, Elliptic, Chainalysis, Flashpoint, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Silent Push, Starling, TRM Labs, all involved in the operation.

Holy crap, dude.

Just, like, th- this is awesome.

... um, uh, but the, the group told the FT that they identified these six hundred and eighty, uh, ish persons based on blockchain analysis, but declined to provide additional specificity of exactly what they, you know, how they did that.

Uh, I did talk to some folks in the blockchain, uh, analytics space, so, you know, there are firms like, uh, TRM and Elliptic and Chainalysis that, that do these kinds of analysis, often for law enforcement or for like, uh, AML compliance type stuff.

Um, and I've developed some folks, uh, some experts in that space who will humor my dumb questions since I'm not a blockchain expert.

Uh, and basically, they explain there are techniques around, uh, clustering wallets together.

The attribution echoes earlier assessments.

BitGet CEO Gracie Chin said the attacks patterns match North Korean hackers and the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic called a DPRK link highly likely.

The hacker's crypto laundering is played out in public with eagle-eyed sleuths tracking every move.

The attacker began hiding funds in Zcash's shielded pool while swap services split in their response.

And for years, the place those wallets converged was a single company, the Huion Company, Phnom Penh, officially a payment processor.

Blockchain analyst at Elliptic traced $98 billion in cryptocurrency into who won since 2014.

When the US Treasury built its case, the figure it could pin as illegal was $4 billion, longer between August 2021 and January 2025, including $37 million from North Korean state hacking.

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