Bitfury Launches Crystal — A Blockchain Investigative Tool for Law Enforcement and Financial Institutions
AMSTERDAM — Jan. 30, 2018 — The Bitfury Group today released Crystal, a new, all-in-one Bitcoin Blockchain investigative tool designed for use by law enforcement organizations and financial institutions.Crystal provides a comprehensive view of the Bitcoin Blockchain and uses advanced analytics and data scraping to map suspicious transactions and related entities. The ground-breaking tool also offers a proprietary “risk scoring” system to assist investigators in revealing and tracking malicious behavior. Crystal was designed to be used by law enforcement agencies to track suspicious bitcoin transactions to real-world entities and determine relationships between criminal actors, and by financial and other institutions engaged in compliance and due diligence activities.“Public blockchains have the potential to fundamentally improve our day-to-day lives and be strong forces for social good,” said Valery Vavilov, CEO of the Bitfury Group, the world’s leading full-service blockchain technology firm. “Unfortunately, there are people who exploit public blockchains and take advantage of their pseudonymity to commit crimes. Bitfury’s new Crystal tool will make it much easier to identify and track criminal activities on the blockchain. With Crystal, we are taking a critical step toward ensuring that the Bitcoin Blockchain and other public blockchains have a safe and secure future.”While blockchain and cryptocurrencies offer significant benefits as tools for peer-to-peer asset transfer, they are also susceptible to misuse by bad actors. As blockchain becomes more widely used, a broader set of tools is needed to track criminal behavior.Bitfury’s Crystal is the most comprehensive tool to date, with the ability to link pseudonymous bitcoin payments to real-word entities, identify ownership of bitcoin wallets and connections between different blockchain entities and provide substantial evidence for use by financial investigators.ABOUT CRYSTALCrystal has a wide range of attributes that ensure blockchain investigations are performed in the most efficient and effective way possible.Comprehensive Tool KitCrystal gathers all information available online into one convenient, user-friendly format. Blockchains contain vast amounts of data; Crystal scours that data and analyzes it. Blockchain data is often not linked to a specific entity — especially when it comes to illicit activities. Crystal goes beyond Blockchain and collects information about Bitcoin addresses and entities from other sources, such as web forums and other websites where Blockchain users congregate. Thanks to this comprehensive approach, Crystal can reveal not just an entity’s address, but also its actual real-world name.User-Friendly ExplorerCrystal’s interface is easy to use and more functional than other blockchain explorers available today. The intuitive tool enables investigators to focus only on relevant transactions and addresses, while also giving them the option to explore the details of particular transactions.Autonomous TrackingWith Crystal’s unique tracking feature, you don’t have to spend days manually tracing suspicious transactions. Crystal can do this for you — in a matter of hours. Crystal gives you a complete visualization of transactions and a final destination address, or an exchange service address where funds were withdrawn as a fiat currency. You can be notified by email that results are ready. So you can work on other tasks while Crystal is working for you.Detailed Risk ScoringCrystal helps investigators evaluate and compare risks of transactions. Armed with this “risk-score,” law enforcement agents and other investigators can trace the most suspicious transactions to a final address or withdrawal point. To produce a risk score, Crystal tracks the relationships of an entity with identified bad actors (such as dark market traders) or reliable parties. From that, Crystal estimates the risk score of a blockchain address — essentially, the chance that the address is related to illegal activity. Results of data analysis are presented as a visualization graph, which can be used in other software tools, or to prepare legal reports that supplement an investigation.InteroperabilityCrystal is the central data source of cryptocurrency analytics for Blockchain investigations. Thanks to its REST API, Crystal can serve as a foundation for a set of automated tools that track and assess transactions for you. Investigators can see analytical results in the Crystal interface, or they can integrate the results into their existing software tools.Entity InteractionCrystal provides evidence of connections between different participants on the Bitcoin Blockchain, making it easy to determine whether any transactions took place between two entities. Crystal then reports these findings in a user-friendly format — including the total number of transactions and the amount transferred between two entities during a specified amount of time.Advanced Analytical Services (Untangling, Clustering, Data Parsing)An entity can use several bitcoin addresses, and one transaction may distribute funds to several entities, making it difficult for investigators to monitor a specific entity. Crystal enables you to stay focused only on what matters in your investigation. Crystal can easily track a certain entityand the flow of its funds by using our efficient algorithms, which group addresses belonging to the same owner into a cluster and keep you focused on the transactions in question.Secure Infrastructure SupportCrystal Pro, a customized software, can be used as an internal investigation tool, deployed on your in-house infrastructure in compliance with internal security policies. The data you enter into Crystal will never leave the secure perimeter of your corporate network.About the Bitfury Group:The Bitfury Group is the leading full-service blockchain technology company and one of the largest private infrastructure providers in the blockchain ecosystem. The Bitfury Group develops and delivers both the software and the hardware solutions necessary for businesses, governments, organizations and individuals to securely move an asset across the blockchain. The expertise of the Bitfury Group ensures successful, easy, fast, secure and cost-effective connectivity to the blockchain. Bitfury is a global team of experts in technology, business, communications, security and civil society. Bitfury believes the blockchain will open new doors for global economic opportunity and prosperity, and its mission is to create and advance blockchain applications that will further promote innovation and the advancement of the peer-to peer economy