Chainalysis Reactor. Is the Anonymity of Cryptocurrencies Under Threat?

Chainalysis Reactor – the creation of Chainalysis – helps the governments to track cryptocurrency transactions and their owners. How can this affect the anonymity of cryptocurrencies?

Alex Harutunian

Oct 21, 2022 - 2 min read

Chainalysis is one of the largest analytical campaigns in the crypto industry. They collect huge amounts of data in many countries and in many different areas. After the data is collected, it is used for various reports and studies.

Chainalysis has also developed software that allows it, based on the collection of data from open sources, to obtain information about alleged owners of certain addresses. The name of this program is Chainalysis Reactor. The Chainalysis campaign with the help of this software has already been able to help governments with the search for various criminals and stolen funds.

“Chainalysis Reactor is powered by the industry's best data. We map hundreds of millions of addresses to real-world entities, adding over 100 new services every week. This includes illicit services like darknet markets, scams, and ransomware, and legitimate services such as DeFi platforms, mining pools, and merchant services.”

You can even get a demo version on the software website. But to do this, you will have to fill out a questionnaire indicating your personal data and place of work.

Let's talk about the success of Chainalysis Reactor. Recently, this software has been able to help solve many problems related to criminal activity. There is even a separate section dedicated to articles with Chainalysis successes in the campaign blog – “Chainalysis in action".

Over the past two years, the following major actions were achieved with the help of Chainalysis Reactor:

The software helped the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) destroy the NetWalker ransomware.
Chainalysis Reactor helped the FBI investigate the attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which was perpetrated by the hacker group DarkSide.
The data obtained from the Chainalysis software helped OFAC to impose sanctions on the OTC Suex cryptocurrency, which received more than $160M from various attackers.
Thanks to the software, Chainalysis - in cooperation with law enforcement agencies - were able to confiscate the cryptocurrency of hackers associated with North Korea to the tune of more than $30M.

We think you've already noticed a trend. Chainalysis collaborates with government organizations to help them track the owners of certain wallets and the senders/recipients of certain transactions.

Yes, this is done in order to catch criminals. But, here is the problem. Didn't cryptocurrency appear as an anonymous tool that was the opposite of the government control? Philosophical questions again. Ideological contradictions again. And what do you think? Let's discuss it in the comments. And we continue to observe.