The predictive blockchain monitoring and investigative platform Merkle Science has announced major upgrades to its blockchain investigations tool.
Merkle Science’s Tracker tool helps government agencies, crypto businesses, and financial institutions to visualise, investigate and identify transaction patterns that are not visible on address-based forensics.
Through Merkle Science’s analytics and proprietary algorithms, Tracker’s revamped features allow for forensic analysis on a cryptocurrency address or a cluster of cryptocurrency addresses at the same time, resulting in better collaboration, accuracy, and ease-of-use.
The decentralised finance segment has grown over 800% in the last year and as of late, the bigger crypto hacks were DeFi-related where smart contracts were exploited. As criminal typologies continue to evolve in crypto, Merkle Science is enhancing Tracker’s features to keep in-step with the challenges faced by our users everyday. Key feature updates include:
- Transaction Forensics and Analytics Tailored for DeFi and Smart Contracts: Tracker decodes the complex transaction logs associated with DeFi transactions, analysing the fund movements within the smart contracts. Through the tool, investigators may visualise the nature of the functions within the smart contracts and get a better idea of the exploitation.
- Going Beyond Address-Level Analysis for Greater Ease-of-Use and Verifiability: Tracker provides a clear, graphical representation of fund movements across wallet clusters — a group of wallets that belong to one entity such as crypto exchange or fund. Users may leverage cluster-based analysis to detect entities and gain more actionable intelligence on bad actors. At the wallet address level, users may add custom tags and add off-chain information such as IP addresses, with the additional ability to comment, share, and collaborate for more thorough investigations.
- Reveal Related Entities with One Click Through the Auto-Investigate Feature: With the click of a button, Tracker’s graph database technology helps investigators generate a map of incoming and outgoing entities associated with a wallet address. Even those who have no prior crypto investigative or forensics technology experience may leverage Merkle Science’s technology.
Merkle Science’s platform takes a risk and behavior-based approach, resulting in more adaptive and effective investigations. As criminal activity evolves, Merkle Science’s investigation and intelligence tools evolve with it so that teams may take expert, evidence-based action accordingly.
Mriganka Pattnaik, Co-founder and CEO at Merkle Science, stated: “In the last six months, we have seen greater demand for support in tracking crime involving privacy coins, DeFi, and NFTs. While the majority of crypto crime used to be associated with Bitcoin, the biggest crypto exploitations — such as the $600 million Poly Network hack — are now DeFi-related, making traditional blockchain investigations tools insufficient. Merkle Science’s revamp of Tracker demonstrates a new era of our investigation tool, combining on- and off-chain intelligence and resulting in more efficient team collaboration.”
“In my experience as a US Attorney prosecuting financial crimes, I’ve seen the importance of easy-to-use investigation tools,” said Mary Beth Buchanan, Merkle Science’s President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer. “Tracker’s revamped features allow for forensic analysis on a cryptocurrency address or a cluster of cryptocurrency addresses at the same time, resulting in better collaboration, accuracy, and ease-of-use.”
After growing 88x in a year, DeFi’s explosive growth has attracted more than just new investors. Over 70% of all of 2021’s major hacks and fraud so far were DeFi-related, so Mary Beth is helping regulators and financial institutions “break apart” smart contacts with this new blockchain investigative tool to ascertain if there are any dodgy dealings inside, while also employing tech that combines on-chain info with off-chain data such as IP addresses to assist investigators’ efforts to identify bad actors.
Mary Beth believes that better blockchain investigation tools not only build ‘safer systems’ but they send a clear message to sketchy actors: ‘An attempt to game the system will result in you being kicked off the system and reported to the authorities.’
