Intelligence, Investigations, and AI-Driven Insights on Inca Digital

Citizenship, Criminal Infrastructure, and Foreign Leverage: What Cambodia’s Naturalization Data Reveals

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How Inca Digital Supports Token Issuers in Idenitfying and Mitigating Threats

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As the Brave browser—the leading privacy-first browser—grows in both prominence and usage, the Brave ecosystem faces an increasingly wide array of risks. These risks compound when a native token like the Basic Attention Token (BAT) is introduced. Each Brave component requires distinct forms of oversight to reduce risk and protect users.

In this installment of our “Inca Use Case” series, we explore how Inca supports platforms like BAT in identifying and mitigating emerging threats.

How Inca Digital Enables Banks to Navigate the Digital Asset Ecosystem

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As banks deepen their engagement with digital assets, they face an increasingly complex risk landscape. Inca Digital equips banks to navigate digital asset complexity through deep ecosystem intelligence, mapping interactions among digital assets, stablecoins, and counterparties across blockchains, exchanges, and off-chain networks. We complement this with real-time monitoring of news, social media signals, and emerging threats to provide timely, actionable insights.

Inca Digital helps banks act on crypto risk intelligence by streamlining Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) submissions, completing robust RFIs, and strengthening internal controls and client monitoring. By integrating ecosystem intelligence, counterparty risk, and real-time anomaly detection, Inca enables banks to maintain compliance, reduce exposure, and make better-informed decisions when engaging with digital asset and stablecoin clients.

How Inca Enables Regulators to Better Understand the Digital Asset Ecosystems

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As digital assets continue to reshape global finance, regulatory bodies face growing challenges in ensuring compliance, assessing risk, and maintaining market integrity. Inca Digital supports regulators with advanced data analytics, open-source intelligence (OSINT), and custom reporting to make sense of complex crypto ecosystems.

From flagging illicit activity to generating actionable insights on platforms and individuals operating illegally, our technology and subject-matter expertise help regulators take informed, timely action. Whether you’re monitoring a trading platform or assessing systemic risks in financial technology, we provide the clarity regulators need to act with confidence.

How Inca Helps Law Enforcement Agencies Navigate Crypto

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inca Digital helps law enforcement agencies navigate crypto by transforming blockchain data into actionable intelligence. By combining powerful on-chain and off-chain capabilities with cross-market surveillance, Inca Digital helps agencies track illicit behavior, analyze digital evidence, and understand emerging threats.

While we offer a suite of specialized tools and data products, Inca Digital’s strength lies in a variety of services and human expertise. Inca works directly with investigators to decode blockchain activity, interpret DeFi protocols, and identify connections across crypto ecosystems. Whether it’s supporting a large-scale investigation or helping an agency build foundational understanding, Inca Digital empowers law enforcement to act confidently in the digital asset space.

How Inca Supports Layer1s in Identifying and Managing Risks

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Layer 1 blockchains are foundational to the crypto ecosystem, and as their ecosystems grow, so do the challenges of maintaining security, transparency, and market integrity.

In this edition of the “Inca Use Case” series, we highlight how Inca supports Layer 1s to deliver targeted intelligence that supports proactive risk management, ecosystem safety, and long-term resilience. From tracking threat actors and scam infrastructure to monitoring liquidity and market behavior, our work combines deep data analysis with actionable insights tailored to each layer 1.

How Inca Supports Stablecoin Issuers in Identifying and Managing Risks

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Stablecoins are reshaping the payments landscape by enabling faster, more reliable transactions at a global scale. As adoption accelerates, so do the associated risks. Inca Digital delivers actionable risk intelligence to help issuers manage these risks, maintain regulatory compliance, and foster secure, sustainable innovation.

In this first installment of our “Inca Use Case” series, we examine how Inca supports stablecoin issuers in identifying and addressing emerging risks.

Inca Digital Aggregates Data to Provide Ecosystem Intelligence

Inca Digital ingests data from a wide range of sources to deliver ecosystem risk intelligence to stablecoin issuers. To help monitor risks associated with stablecoins, Inca collects real-time trading data from both centralized and decentralized exchanges, scans the dark web for stablecoin related mentions, aggregates on-chain activity, and monitors social media for emerging trends and threats.

Inca Digital Finds 1/3 of Bitcoin ATMs are in HIDTAs

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) offer users an on/offramp to crypto with the benefit of physical accessibility and cash-based design. Despite their unique offerings, they have been linked to illicit activity, including unlicensed money transmission, drug trafficking, and laundering of criminal proceeds, by the U.S. Department of Justice and FinCEN¹ ². Additionally, BTMs often employ inconsistent KYC/AML standards and allow sub-threshold transactions with minimal identity checks.

Nearly ⅓ of BTMs are in HIDTAs

Inca Digital conducted a preliminary analysis of BTMs across the U.S. by cross-referencing their locations with High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTAs). We found that 32.24% of BTMs in the U.S. are situated within federally designated HIDTAs, raising concerns that these BTMs may be used to facilitate narcotics-related transactions.

Bybit Hack: $1.4B in ETH Stolen, Insolvency Concerns Rise

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

$5.6 Million+ in Losses of FTX Debt Claims by Scam Group

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

Bitcoin Donation Tracing

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Inca Digital investigated the approximately 8.07 Bitcoin deposit to the Assange Donation Address. In the view of Inca Digital, it is likely that Jack Dorsey donated the ~$486K in Bitcoin to Julian Assange.

Inca Digital’s on-chain analysis reveals that the source of the 8.07173122 Bitcoin donation to the Assange Donation Address appears to have originated from CashApp. The transaction which serves as the initial source of the donation amount constituted a transfer of 21 Bitcoin from CashApp to a private wallet. Inca Digital’s analysis suggests that CashApp is primarily used for retail purposes, with the average transfer amount being far lower than 21 Bitcoin and there are not many known “whales” utilizing CashApp. There is one notable exception: Square founder Jack Dorsey.

Crypto Intelligence Alert: Hamas

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

Market Manipulation on Huobi Signals Possible Fraud

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

Crypto Intelligence Alert - Binance Market Surveillance

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Inca Digital recently completed an investigation into Binance and the Binance ecosystem.

The below cross market surveillance analysis covers January through October 2023 and finds that across both high-cap and low-cap tokens, Binance markets are generally very healthy, showing minimal signs of anomalous trading activities.

Distribution tail exponents, skewness, kurtosis, trade-size clustering analysis, and other statistical analyses reveal that Binance’s high-cap markets fall within acceptable ranges, suggesting minimal market manipulation. While Student’s test for clustering values for low-cap tokens on Binance are lower than those for high-cap tokens, they still remain higher than what is observed on most other cryptocurrency exchanges. This implies that Binance hosts a relatively large proportion of real traders, even within the low-cap token market.

Crypto Intelligence Alert: Binance Market Surveillance

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

Crypto Intelligence Alert: Unauthorized Use of the Binance Name

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

Crypto Intelligence Alert: TRON

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Read the full report.

Crypto Intelligence Alert - TRON

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, Circle made the announcement that they were de-platforming the TRON blockchain for native issuance of USDC, severing their official business dealings with the chain. In their announcement, Circle stated the following through their official corporate Twitter/X account:

The explicit mention of compliance in Circle’s official announcement sparked numerous questions within the crypto ecosystem. Inca Digital is endeavoring through this Crypto Intelligence Alert to clarify certain instances of negative activity observed on the TRON blockchain and provide further context around factors that may have driven this decision.

Binance: Corporate and Counterparty Risk Map

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Digital asset risk management often stops at blockchain forensics, which is insufficient for multi-asset class financial service providers. Inca Digital risk management tools can identify exposure to particular companies and exchanges.

In light of the recent lawsuits against Binance, Inca Digital is releasing data on a comprehensive network of relationships that provides a visual representation of the connections between various companies and individuals associated with Binance, Binance.US, and other subsidiary and affiliated companies. We hope this network enables a better understanding of Binance’s organizational structure and ultimately leads to more transparency in the operations of crypto exchanges globally.

How Russians Use Tether to Evade Global Sanctions

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Inca Digital’s investigations team utilized our data analytics tools and global intelligence assets to collect data on 163 cryptocurrency trading platforms globally - this includes centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer (P2P) market places, and over the counter service providers (OTC). Of those 163 trading platforms we collected data on, 79 allow Russian nationals to purchase cryptocurrency, all with different KYC requirements, maximum trading limits, and use of technology to identify the location of their users. We focused our research on what financial services these platforms provided to Russian citizens over the past year and how Tether, specifically, is being used.

Pig Butchering: Investigation of Crypto Scam

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Inca Digital’s NLP identified thousands of shell companies originating out of China. Inca Digital’s investigations team then found structure operations, company documents and manuals, and extremely successful operation in the Chinese-speaking world.

Victims are groomed for 1-3 months before initiating the scam. Chinese scammers call this “raising a pig before slaughter.” The scammers operate like a well structured corporation, have head offices and branch locations, divide labor between IT, communications, and finance. Employees in the scam are salaried, receive time-off, and scammers receive 20-40% commissions for successful “slaughters”.

Crypto Self-Policing and Accountability

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Many crypto financial service providers have spent the last several years claiming that potential regulatory and enforcement efforts are unnecessary because they can police themselves. However, scandals and collapses in the crypto industry, such as the insider trading allegations at OpenSea, the massive fraud carried out at FTX, and the failures of Voyager and 3AC, serve as stark reminders that self-regulation is failing to protect investors and maintain integrity in the marketplace.

Inside Inca Digital: How Our Rebrand Supports Our Mission to Deliver the Industry’s Only Complete View of Crypto

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For many in the digital asset community, the past several years have been truly formative ones for their businesses and careers – and Inca Digital is no exception. Collaborating with our fellow Incas – a diverse team of talented engineers, security experts, and analysts – we’ve worked hard to deliver data, analytics, and investigations that enable unprecedented insight into the digital asset landscape for the crypto industry, traditional financial institutions, and government agencies.

Enhancing geotagging models

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Building on top of our crypto users mapping work featured in The Wall Street Journal, we enhanced our NLP models and expanded the scope of the analysis to include more trading venues and products.
We fed millions of social media posts into the model to get more precise results with higher confidence levels.
We increased geotagging granularity to map users on a state/province level.

Identifying traders

Within crypto, social media platforms are among the most valuable data sources for community discovery. Our NLP components process human-generated content and discover relationships between entities. By discovering unique media content patterns, they can identify users who are active on specific trading venues. A separate set of NLP models are trained to geotag these users using 4 methods that compliment each other.

NLP Insights into Guatemala’s Remittances: Traditional vs Crypto Services

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Key findings

According to 2020 World Bank data, remittances make up 14.7% of Guatemala’s GDP. Inca Digital through natural language processing named entity analysis sought to ascertain the usage of traditional vs crypto services to deliver these remittances.

Initial analysis of popular social media platforms and application data indicates the majority of Guatemalan communities still prefer to utilize traditional money services for remittances and money transfers. For instance, local traditional banks and their corresponding digital apps (G&T, BI, BAM, Banrural) remain the most popular methods to transfer money.

Stablecoin Volatility Analysis – BIS Variance Threshold

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Methodology

Inca Digital approached this report addressing the following requirements:

Calculate the percent difference between identified stablecoin prices and its fiat equivalent (USD).
Identify how many times identified stablecoins exceeded the 10bp (0.1%) level over a one-year period.

Time range

The identified one-year period is Sept 2020 – Sept 2021

Stablecoins

Inca digital evaluated the following stablecoins:

USDT, USDC, BUSD, HUSD, GUSD, PAX, DAI, UST

Key results

None of the stablecoins analyzed met the Variance Threshold (VT) that the difference in stablecoin/fiat value must not exceed 10bp of the value of the underlying fiat more than three times over a one-year period. All stablecoins price deviation overview (daily data).

Geotagging Crypto Derivatives Traders with NLP

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Inca Digital’s Investigation Team is often tasked with collecting hidden data on crypto market participants. Although the blockchain space supplies troves of open data to sift through, trading venue activity often remains a mystery due to unreliable trade data and a lack of transparency from trading venue owners. To fill these data gaps, we leverage a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that can produce reliable datasets based on the digital footprint of crypto users. In the example below, we show how particular exchange users can be identified and geotagged.

Inca Digital CBDC Factbook: The Bahamas

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

The Bahamas’ Sand Dollar is a distributed CBDC that was rolled out on October 20, 2020. The Bahamas is one of the first countries to move beyond pilot testing of its CBDC. It has a functioning blockchain ecosystem and is progressing in creating CBDC-specific legislation. As The Bahamas is an island nation and has many residents who do not have access to financial services, the Sand Dollar’s main objective is to provide greater financial inclusion across all the country.

Inca Digital CBDC Factbook: European Union

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

Europe’s Digital Euro is a joint CBDC project of the EU member countries. As of February 2021, the European countries are more or less on the same stage of conceptualizing the legislative, technical, and business components necessary for a CBDC. The only exception is France, which has already conducted two pilot tests. Despite the countries’ independent efforts, the European Central Bank (ECB) will be the one responsible for the introduction of the Digital Euro. Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, expects it to happen within a 4-year timeframe.

Inca Digital CBDC Factbook: Venezuela

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

Venezuela’s Petro, also known as Petromoneda, is an allegedly oil-backed CBDC introduced in 2018. Although actively pushed by the Maduro government, Petro has not been actively used by the Venezuelan citizens. Most of it was being immediately sold for US dollars or exchanged for goods and services. Despite the lack of adoption, the Venezuelan government managed to put together one of the most advanced CBDC projects, making Venezuela one of the first countries to introduce a CBDC legislation and a fully functioning blockchain ecosystem. Russia’s involvement in development of a technical base for Petro allowed for a quick rollout of a sophisticated instrument used by Venezuela to circumvent US sanctions.

TVL inflation in lending protocols

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In November 2020, Inca’s Investigation Team noticed unusual transaction patterns occurring in Compound protocol on Ethereum. These unusual transactions potentially indicate crypto whales moving large amounts of DAI across the Compound protocol to drive up the key DeFi adoption indicator – TVL.

TVL is a popular metric in the DeFi ecosystem representing the total value of assets locked or supplied into a DeFi application’s smart contracts. It is used to assess the amount of liquidity available on the protocol and is often considered as a measure of the project’s strength.

Inca Digital CBDC Factbook: Russia

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

Russia’s Digital Ruble is a CBDC designed to be an additional form of money equivalent to cash and non-cash rubles. Currently, the country is discussing the preferred architecture, model, and blockchain, and the government has already tested a CBDC prototype. From a technical standpoint, Russia has created a technical foundation for Venezuela’s CBDC (Petro), as we discuss further below. This suggests the country is in advanced stages of technological implementation.

Inca Digital CBDC Factbook

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The Inca Digital CBDC Factbook is a compilation of intelligence insights on international efforts to create Central Bank Digital Currencies. Most of the information presented in the Factbook is derived from natural language, financial, and technical datasets collected, cleaned, and enriched by Inca Digital. It relies heavily on the combined experience of Inca team members in software development, finance, and intelligence. Unlike other attempts to aggregate CBDC information, our Factbook is mostly focused on datasets, graphs, and diagrams, rather than political analysis.

Tether's Growing Role in Illegal Activities

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tether has been the subject of multiple investigations over the past few years. Most fit in at least one of these categories:

Currency issuance practices
Lack of corporate transparency
Reserves auditability difficulties
Loss of funds due to security breaches, enforcement actions, and questionable banking practices
Lack of KYC/AML mechanisms
Various civil and criminal charges against organizations linked to Tether and Bitfinex

Our main assumption when it comes to understanding the motives of the Tether creators is that no elaborate fraud schemes are needed when you can run a fractional reserve system and collect trading fees. We focus our attention on showing the role Tether plays in the crypto market without attempting to attribute individual crimes and securities laws violations to individual ecosystem participants.

Abnormal Trading Volumes on FTX

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Our investigation team constantly monitors abnormal activity happening on multiple market venues. The bar chart below highlights the anomalous bitcoin volumes traded on FTX in periods of low volatility. Of note are the readily identifiable peaks of 1 min trading volume that don’t significantly affect the price itself (the difference between open and close price).

Scheduled trading activity dominates Huobi and OKEx

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the market manipulation metrics we pay attention to is the time of the trade distribution. Both Huobi and OKEx show abnormal distributions for second-of-the-trade and minute-of-the-trade graphs.

On Huobi, the spot market graph displays the convergence of various assets at the same time periods (15, 30, 45 minutes).

China Puts Pressure on Crypto Custodians Ahead Of Digital Yuan Release

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the past 3 months, the price of Bitcoin has almost doubled from around $10,500 in October to $24,000 in the middle of December. This was a volatile journey with daily price swings reaching 17.6%. Some of the biggest price changes coincided with troubling news around custodians, ranging from withdrawal suspensions to exploited security vulnerabilities. Interestingly, the market had plenty of warning signs well before the volatility spikes, but very few acted upon them. Let’s have a look at how proactive surveillance of traditional media, tech blogs, and social media can give you a head-start of hours, and in some cases, days. The work below uses Yupana’s Natural Language data streams fed into Inca’s data solutions - one can see spikes in negative sentiment and messages classified as a security vulnerability, fraud, and withdrawal problems.

Crypto Market Anomalies December 2020

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Predictable trading patterns on Kraken
Signs of fraudulent market activity reporting on Poloniex
BCH trading volumes on Binance US do not conform to expected distribution patterns
Abnormal trade patterns on HitBTC
Suspicious rounded trades on Huobi

Predictable trading patterns on Kraken

Kraken’s BTC-USD perpetual swap trading has noticeable automated activity. Both minute- and second- time of trade distributions show trade count spikes in predictable intervals.

Deciphering Pesticide Resistance in the Digital Currency Space

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Uncontrolled use of deanonymizing technologies, such as blockchain forensics and darknet monitoring tools can threaten long-term security and safety of digital ecosystems.

We need to start paying attention to the scientific evidence of their long-term effectiveness instead of anecdotal claims of their ability to solve today’s KYC/AML and law enforcement problems.

One way to approach this problem is to rely on scientifically proven methods of malicious agent controls, heavily inspired by modern pest management techniques.

Natural Language Analysis Of PayPal Enabling Bitcoin Buying/Selling

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

PayPal PYPL -0.8% officially announced its plans to allow its ~350 million users to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. This news came amid a steady run-up in the crypto markets, with Bitcoin up ~80% YTD and 3% since its low in March.

This announcement has catalyzed discussion about the adoption and institutionalization of digital assets. There are opposing views from within the community in regards to both the significance of this news, and whether it is supportive or detrimental to the vision of a decentralized financial future.

Should Regulators License Blockchain Oracles?

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Blockchain oracles, or off-chain data providers, are key players in the blockchain ecosystem - wielding as much if not more power than miners and protocols developers. Often misunderstood and overlooked, they suffer from constant misuse and security vulnerabilities. Licensing and endorsing professional oracles is key to improving the overall health of the blockchain ecosystem.

A fairly straightforward oracle use case is in futures smart contracts built by crypto trading venue FTX and other betting platforms that allow people to place bets on the next US president. Their oracles were supposed to be the media, such as CNN, calling the official win of one of the presidential candidates. Using the confusion around who had won the election on social networks and in traditional media, however, the betting platforms took it upon themselves to have the final say in the matter, creating a conflict of interest when it comes to calling the winner.

Venezuela is Patient Zero Challenging The Western Financial System with Bitcoin

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Global sovereign currencies are regulated and mediated by central banks, with significant tracking and infrastructure capabilities to allow for secure currency transactions, to enforce government policy, and to monitor criminal behavior. These safeguards do not exist with cryptocurrencies, which enable peer-to-peer instantaneous and immutable blockchain transactions. The result: participants can sidestep American controlled transaction mechanisms. Non-state actors can fund illegal operations, state adversaries can evade sanctions, and near-peers can weaken the power of the US Dollar globally. While broad-range challenges to the Western financial system will not happen overnight, America’s near-peer adversaries are testing new ways – like using digital currency – to circumvent the status quo. The US can and should respond by shutting down those tests where it can and by promoting innovation at home.

Crypto Market Anomalies November 2020

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Anomalous trades on FTX
LINK Trading Volumes Deviations on Huobi
Crypto in the FinCEN Leak
October Spike in Crypto Scam Activity — Finland

Anomalous trades on FTX

FTX demonstrates a noticeable leading digit spike, possibly indicating non-standard trading activity on the exchange. Recent order distribution sizes for COMP (Compound) deviate from other markets and contradict Benford’s law.

Inca Digital CBDC Factbook: China

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

China’s Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), also known as Digital Yuan, e-CNY, and Digital RMB, is a form of centralized CBDC designed to replace cash in circulation as well as streamline cross-border payments. Far along in its development process, it already features comprehensive regulation and sophisticated pilot projects involving major Chinese banks and internet giants. As of November 2020, these pilot projects already exceeded $300M exchanged in 4 million transactions. The DCEP initiative is fueled by China’s concern over US Dollar dominance, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

DeFi Tokens Tumble But Fundamentals Remain At All-Time High

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Asset prices in the DeFi space have plummeted since their recent highs. The DeFi Index Perpetual Futures instrument on FTX, which tracks a basket of DeFi assets, is down almost 50% from its high on September 1st:

Many individual tokens have fallen even further. Serum (SRM) and yearn.finance (YFI), for example, are down more than 65% from their September 1st prices:

Natural Language Analysis Of PayPal Enabling Bitcoin Buying/Selling

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On June 23 of this year I reported on the rumors regarding PayPal and Venmo to enable Bitcoin buying/selling:

PayPal PYPL +0.3% officially announced its plans to allow its ~350 million users to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. This news came amid a steady run-up in the crypto markets, with Bitcoin up ~80% YTD and 3% since its low in March:

Central Bank Digital Currencies And The U.S./China Great Power Competition

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tensions heighten between the United States and China amid trade wars, COVID-19, a chaotic presidential election period, disputes over Tibet, and increasing pressure at the Taiwan Strait.

The “Great Power Competition” (GPC) is a termed now commonly used to describe the global affairs between the United States and China. Technology, specifically dual-use technology (which has both military and civil use), plays a critical role within the GPC. The United States has taken steps to secure its advances in dual-use technology, most recently with the ban of exportation of such material to Hong Kong in mid-2020.

Crypto in the FinCEN Leak

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Buzzfeed and their partners recently released stories about a trove of almost 2,500 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by banks with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) between 2000 and 2017. They included thousands of suspicious bank transactions totaling over $35B. In cooperation with BuzzFeed, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published a dataset that includes detailed information on 4500 suspicious transactions.

Inca Digital’s investigation team correlated these transactions with blockchain and crypto market venue activity around the filing dates. By looking at the transaction sizes and timestamps, we matched senders (originator banks) and receivers (beneficiary banks) mentioned in SARs to specific blockchain addresses and business entities. Note that the below research is only circumstantial evidence meant to show supplement the work done by ICIJ and other investigative journalists. Still, from an intelligence perspective, the following should initiate a deeper dive into the data.

Is The Promise of DeFi Yield Farming Destined to FAIL?

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Cryptocurrency exchanges have been called altcoin casinos from day 1. They trade and promote thousands of tokens that have been dreamed up by former front end developers turned ERC20 evangelists.

Their copycat whitepapers make promises that not only do not pass the Howey Test, but are often laughed at by sane technology, security, and financial experts. But, does it really matter if your business is to sell people the dream of becoming rich overnight?

Another Project Bites The Dust: How Someone Turned $200 Into $250k

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been one crazy event after another in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) world. This incident involves a spectacular pump, a catastrophic bug, and one lucky individual. Further, it highlights the importance of understanding the financial risk associated with DeFi applications.

What is SYFI?

Soft Yearn Finance (SYFI) is a DeFi project labeled as “A Fundamentally Yield-Stable Cryptocurrency.” Essentially, it was supposed to be nothing more than an artificially pegged token to the Yearn Finance token (YFI).

Can You Have Your Bitcoin And Eat It Too?

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Debating the opportunity costs of earning on your Bitcoin.

Crypto Twitter, like many Twitter-spheres, is as full of self-affirmation and choir preaching as it is of internal holy-wars (not too unlike those described on this post). We can characterize two camps within the crypto/digital asset space. This is a gross oversimplification to be sure, but paints a picture of the space where there are a spectrum of competing ideas.

One group is financial and technically more conservative; this group wants the hardest monetary policy, extremely high levels of computational security, and the ability to self-verify everything. They might see the benefit of more complex functionality, but think this functionality must be built on top of a highly reliable and trustworthy base layer. These folks value minimizing attack vectors, self-auditing, backwards compatibility, and privacy. The Bitcoin Maximalists fit into this group.

Government Orgs Mining Cryptocurrency

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Almost a decade ago, Torrent trackers looked into their IP logs to find interesting connections coming from a variety of organizations that openly advocate against their right to exist. Some of the reported illegal downloads even revealed a peculiar taste in music of presidential staff. Peer-to-peer file sharing battle lost, the very same organizations turned their sights on other distributed technologies, cryptocurrency mining being one of them. In this piece, Inca’s investigation team looks into digital fingerprints left by digital currency mining software on the web.

Following Funds From The Twitter Hack & Bitcoin Scam - Affecting Joe Biden, Elon Musk, And Others

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A massive hack affected Twitter around 3pm EDT Wednesday (July 15th 2020), in which many high-profile accounts were used to tweet out a large-scale doubling scam.

It is unclear exactly how the hackers gained access to make the tweets from these accounts, but Twitter posted an update which corroborated reports that indicated company personnel and internal admin tools were involved.

Considering that the hackers had control over some of the most influential accounts on Twitter, posting a simple Bitcoin scam and exposing their access is a curious choice. As Kris Holt said, It could have been a lot worse - Accounts were frozen quickly, and the main known hacker address only received around $120,000 worth of BTC at the time of writing. Tracking these funds, however small the amount, is important and the FBI is reportedly investigating:

Twitter Hack Addresses and Transactions

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sankey Diagram showing bitcoin blockchain transactions with the top 50 interacting addresses from one of the Twitter Hack addresses. Forensic analysis of Inca’s data in Splunk.

Bitfinex Stolen Funds Investigation

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Having a powerful analytical tool that can provide an ample market overview might be very helpful, especially when attempting to understand the bigger picture in the market. To understand the crypto market, one has to understand its problems. Hacks and data breaches, that even institutional players appear to be vulnerable to, are a common problem. Most of the current approaches to investigating the breach focus on tracking the stolen funds by means of blockchain forensics tools. However powerful and helpful these tools may be, it is often not enough to recover stolen funds.

Buzz Of PayPal & Venmo to Facilitate Crypto Buying/Selling

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

News of Financial Tech companies Paypal PYPL +3.2% and Venmo potentially looking to roll out crypto purchasing is energizing the digital asset space.

CoinDesk reported that three individuals told them these companies plan to offer “direct sales of cryptocurrency” to their users.

This news is quickly being circulated and discussed on social media.

Here is a visualization of the number of cryptocurrency-specific natural language events which mention Paypal over the last 30 days (Inca Digital data in Splunk Enterprise):

Bitcoin Is More Stable Than You Think - Blockchain Analysis Reveals

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the constant headlines which label Bitcoin as excessively volatile and unpredictable, it largely remains unweathered by the greater political, economic, and technological fluctuations of our times.

The cryptocurrency space as a whole is still viewed as the “wild west” of finance from the outside (quite legitimately I might add). There is often little distinction between cryptocurrencies and recognition of their differential properties. As Andreas Antonopolous stated at Eth Denver last year: “We are all weirdos in the same camp. They cannot tell the difference.”

Elaborate Pump And Dump Scheme Involving Monero, HitBTC, and CoinTelegraph

Tue, 26 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Reliable and accurate data is crucial for understanding any market. While financial signals and metrics associated with an asset modify the decision making of traders, regulators, and financial institutions, crypto finance data still lack credibility. Volumes are widely assumed to be inflated or outright fabricated, project fundamentals (such as the identity of the founders, location of operation, affiliated organizations, or claims made in the white paper) are often difficult to obtain or verify, public sources of knowledge (such as news outlets and public data providers) commonly contradict one-another, and social media platforms are filled with scammers and bots.

Bitcoin Halving Metrics Reveal Social Media Spikes And A Stable Network

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin recently experienced its third block reward halving (an event also referred to as “the halvening”). A process through which the amount of newly minted bitcoin that is paid to miners from the coinbase is reduced. It only happens every 210,000 blocks. Each bitcoin block takes roughly 10 minutes to mine, so this event only occurs every 4 years.

The coinbase transaction contained within block 629,999 (the last block to receive a mining subsidy of 12.5 BTC) contained the following message:

Venezuela Foreign Influence Campaign Analytics

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Applying Inca Digital data solutions outside of Cryptofinance: Analysis of Foreign Influence Campaigns in Splunk with publicly available Twitter data.

STEEM Community Battles for Control

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Steemit Inc was recently acquired by Justin Sun, the founder of TRON. Following the acquisition, there seemed to be mixed support from within the Steem ecosystem, but positive response from the TRON community. Many argue that this move would help Steem expand marketing efforts and bring new users on to the various Steem-backed platforms.

A large percentage of the STEEM & STEEM POWER assets were held by Steemit Inc at the time of Sun’s acquisition, most of which came from the coin’s pre-mine (called the “ninja-mined stake”). This now became controlled by Justin Sun, even though the funds were said to be used only for decentralizing and developing the ecosystem.

Remote Work - Philosophy & Technology

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As of recent, the idea of working from home or working on the road (people who do this are often dubbed digital nomads) has become exceedingly more popular. Most of what I see on the internet about remote work are by independent content creators who self-publish or contract out their work. Many of these individuals use sites like Medium or YouTube to host their content, or have gigs as graphic designers, web developers, or digital marketers. Less commonly do I come across other companies who work primarily, or entirely, remotely.

KICK Token — Market Manipulation Analysis

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There is a curious new token running up the ladder on CoinMarketCap (CMC). The “KICK Token” rose to rank 33 by Market Capitalization, now sitting at $324,790,597 (was just $21,000,000 a month ago). Lets take a closer look at this “asset” to find out what it is, and to determine how and why there is such a sharp price increase.

In this article I take a look at the “KICK ecosystem,” recent developments surrounding this surge on CMC, and investigate the financial data surrounding the token by using Nakamoto Terminal in Splunk Enterprise (you can skip to the last section for this).

Crypto Seasons

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What’s behind an index price?

This short article discusses an automated data-driven trading model for selected cryptocurrencies, with the goal of creating a trading strategy that produces long term positive returns. Fundamentally, the model is based on a mean reversion concept borrowed from traditional finance, which essentially states that an asset price should revert to its long term average. One can expect that, absent shocks or trends, an average long term price should be more or less constant. And therefore occasional movements in price will have to be offset to some degree by opposite price movements in order to maintain the price average.

Cryptofinancial Impact: Binance Hack

Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Using Inca’s Splunk-based Cryptofinancial data solutions, I take a quick look at the recent Binance exchange hack.

On May 07, 2019 over 7,000 BTC was successfully transferred from the Binance hot wallet, an amount currently worth more than $40 million.

The CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, quickly responded to the hack on twitter telling customers that the loss would be covered from the exchange’s Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU). Initially, there was discussion of potentially Pushing for Bitcoin Rollback. This would be near impossible to achieve and likely would have caused a serious dispute within the bitcoin community, something Changpeng Zhao recognized:

Proof of Work

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Inca is a remote company. We have offices in Washington, DC and Paris where our team is free to hang out and work for as long as they want – but nothing mandatory. They all work where they want, when they want.

I remember taking a class with Andrew Sherman at Georgetown Law called “Entrepreneurship and the Law.” One piece of advice he gave that stuck with me was that investors and partners care more about the strength of the founders’ relationship, and the strength of the team, than they do about the actual services the company provides. A year in to leading Inca, I have found this to be true. I get just as many questions about my team and the processes we use to organize remotely as I do about our data aggregation and analytics platform.

Crypto Fundamentals

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the burgeoning world of cryptofinance it is entirely possible to be seduced by the barrage of stories of the latest and greatest, to be lured to the potential of the shiny, new and disruptive, and in the process overlook fundamental technological factors that often can provide valuable insights into the future viability of a technology, it’s ability to attract a relevant developer community and then address the uses cases the project’s are intended to serve. While readers may have caught on to this notion, it often goes deeper than one thinks. In this first article we start by exploring some of the less frequently discussed aspects of the cryptofinance ecosystem that can send mixed messaging and contribute to confusion.

Open Data Aggregation

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As a company that does data aggregation and analytics on a grand scale, we felt it was important to bring up the subject of how copyright and contract law impact our work.

One of the best discussions I have been able to find in 2015 on the future of data and data analysis, copyright law, and contractual agreements remains to be David Sorkin, Peter DiCola, and Marcelo Halpern’s debate on the topic at Northwestern Law School. Much has changed since then - especially with how much we’ve learned about companies using open data - but the law and the topics they were discussing 4 years ago are still relevant today. That said, our use and analysis of open data sets are rooted in case law from the 1990s. One particular case, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, serves as the backbone of how we approach collecting and processing open data. This point of view was supported by outside counsel as well: