Uncovering a new frontier in cryptocurrency asset tracing

Cryptocurrency markets should not be seen as a safe hiding place. Investigators have many tools, old and new, at their disposal. Read more in our whitepaper, Cryptocurrency: The days of a "wild west" cryptocurrency market are drawing to a close.

Cryptocurrency transactions do not exist in a vacuum. The transactions that underlie them also generate computer data, correspondence and other ancillary records. The success of an asset tracing assignment will depend on the investigator’s ability to uncover and interpret those records. Cryptocurrency markets should not be seen as a safe hiding place. Investigators have many tools, old and new, at their disposal.

 With more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation at the time of writing. It would be impractical to write a manual that deals with asset tracing in every cryptocurrency – it would doubtless be outdated long before it was completed. In this paper, we concentrate on the most widely-used and well-known cryptocurrency: bitcoin. We highlight at the outset that the contents of this paper may be more or less applicable to other cryptocurrencies, and that the ability of the investigator to generate useful results may depend partially upon which cryptocurrency is under investigation.

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