Merkle Science Announces Major Enhancements to Blockchain Investigation Tool

Tracker’s advanced features include transaction forensics for DeFi and smart contracts, augmented analysis beyond address level, and advanced geo-location tagging capabilities

New York & Singapore — November 10, 2021 — Merkle Science, the leading predictive blockchain monitoring and investigative platform, today announced major upgrades to its blockchain investigations tool. Tracker helps government agencies, crypto businesses, and financial institutions visualize, investigate and identify transaction patterns that are not visible on address-based forensics. Through Merkle Science’s powerful analytics and proprietary algorithms, Tracker’s revamped features allows 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.

Mriganka Pattnaik, Co-founder & 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.”

“Through my experience as a U.S. Attorney prosecuting financial crimes, I have seen the importance of easy-to-use investigation tools,” added Mary Beth Buchanan, Merkle Science’s President, Americas & Global Chief Legal Officer. “Law enforcement and government agencies need investigative tools that are easy to use and accurate, with data and visualizations that are independently verifiable in case of subpoenas. And for financial institutions and crypto businesses that manage thousands of crypto fraud claims, they need the appropriate tools to assess the legitimacy of the claims which directly affects the businesses’ bottom lines.”

The decentralized 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. Today’s key feature updates include:

• Transaction Forensics and Analytics Tailored for DeFi and Smart Contracts: Tracker decodes the complex transaction logs associated with DeFi transactions, analyzing the fund movements within the smart contracts. Through the tool, investigators may visualize 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 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 powerful 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 state-of-the-art technology.

Unlike other blockchain monitoring and investigative tools on the market, 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.

About Merkle Science

Founded in 2018, Merkle Science is the next-generation predictive cryptocurrency risk and intelligence platform that helps crypto companies, financial institutions, and government entities detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activities involving cryptocurrencies. Tracker leverages Merkle Science's proprietary Behavioral Rule Engine to go beyond the blacklists — which are inherently backward-looking — so that investigations and compliance teams may better detect and investigate illicit transactions. Tracker also helps law enforcement and regulators understand the risks across all types of crypto businesses, stay on top of emerging technologies, and keep pace with the industry's increasingly complex illicit activities. 

Merkle Science envisions a world powered by crypto and is creating the infrastructure necessary to ensure the safe and healthy growth of the cryptocurrency industry as it becomes a key pillar of the $22 trillion financial services ecosystem. Backed by leading venture capital firms Darrow Holdings, Kraken Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Fenbushi Capital, Kenetic, Lunex Ventures, and the Singapore Government-supported deep technology fund, SGInnovate, we enable businesses to scale and mature so that a full range of individuals, entities, and services may transact with crypto safely. For more information on Merkle Science, please visit https://www.merklescience.com.