Arkham Intelligence

Last updated
Arkham Intelligence
IndustryBlockchain data
Crypto analytics
Founded2020
FounderMiguel Morel
Headquarters
Dallas
,
United States
ServicesWeb application
Website www.arkm.com

Arkham Intelligence, branded Arkham, is a global company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform as well as a public data application that enables users to analyze blockchain and cryptocurrency activity. Founded by Miguel Morel in 2020, the company's platform utilizes AI to identify and catalog the owners of blockchain addresses. [1] Its partners include various cryptocurrency and blockchain companies.

History

Morel founded Arkham in 2020 and received investments from angel investors including Tim Draper, Joe Lonsdale of Palantir Technologies, and Sam Altman of OpenAI and Worldcoin. [1]

In July 2022, during the midst of Celsius Network’s bankruptcy, Arkham found that Celsius owed over $500 million worth of digital assets to three of the biggest DeFi lenders, including Aave Protocol; it was also reported that Celsius worked with a previously unidentified fund manager to purchase NFTs and make deposits on yield-bearing decentralized exchanges. [2] [3] [4]

Arkham reported on a hacker who stole approximately $477 million worth of tokens from FTX and sent 180,000 Ethereum (ETH) coins to at least a dozen digital wallets in November 2022. Arkham analysts noted that the hacker followed two patterns: operating between 08:00 and 10:00 UTC and creating new accounts for each operation. [5]

In December 2022, Arkham tracked over $1 million of transferred funds tied to former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried as well as $1.7 million worth of cryptocurrencies liquidated within a 24-hour time span. [6] [7] This data was used by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, who filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried for his role in FTX's collapse. [6]

Arkham provided data in January 2023 that identified “an alleged nexus of money laundering” from Bitzlato through intermediate wallets of Binance. Over the course of several years, it was found that the intermediary wallet deposited $15 million worth of crypto onto Binance's platform. [8] That same month, Arkham released a report which revealed that Alameda liquidators lost $72,000 worth of crypto while trying to recover funds as part of FTX's bankruptcy. [9]

The ARKM token was launched in July 2023 as the native token of the Arkham Intel Exchange. Originally released on Binance Launchpad, ARKM launched at a price of $0.05 [10] and reached a price of $3.98 in March 2024. [11] As of July 2024, the market capitalization for the ARKM token is US$326 million. [12]

In June 2024, Arkham offered a $150,000 bounty on its Intel Exchange, which was solved and paid out, to anyone who discovered who was behind the DJT crypto asset. During an X Spaces event earlier that month, Martin Shkreli claimed that he and Barron Trump were behind the Trump-branded cryptocurrency. [13]

In July 2024, Arkham tracked the German Government's movements of Bitcoin to centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Bitstamp as it completely sold off its nearly 50,000 BTC holdings worth more than $2 billion at the time. German authorities had seized the Bitcoin from the operators of Movie2k.to and transferred it to a crypto wallet Arkham identified as being owned by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office. [14] [15]

Arkham tagged the cryptocurrency wallets of Mt. Gox, the defunct cryptocurrency exchange, which as of July 2024 held nearly 140,000 bitcoin. Arkham users were then able to track the onchain movements of those holdings, worth billions of dollars, as the trustee began making repayments to creditors. [16] [17] [18] [19]

Other notable blockchain identifications include Robinhood Markets [20] and Justin Sun. [21]

Related Research Articles

A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptocurrency</span> Digital currency not reliant on a central authority

A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of bitcoin</span> Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.

Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.

Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.

CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan, the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies.

Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$3 billion in January 2024. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Currency Group</span> American venture capital company

Digital Currency Group Inc. (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.

A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.

Tether is a cryptocurrency stablecoin launched by Tether Limited Inc. in 2014.

A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.

Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is a global company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high-frequency trading software. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan shortly before the Chinese government restricted cryptocurrency companies. Binance subsequently left Japan for Malta and currently has no official company headquarters.

Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solana (blockchain platform)</span> Public blockchain platform

Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.

FTX Trading Ltd., commonly known as FTX, is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang and collapsed in 2022 after massive fraud perpetrated by Bankman-Fried and his partner Caroline Ellison forced the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Celsius Network</span> American cryptocurrency company

Celsius Network LLC was a cryptocurrency company. Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, Celsius maintained offices in four countries and operated globally. Users could deposit a range of cryptocurrency digital assets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, into a Celsius wallet to earn a percentage yield, and could take out loans by pledging their cryptocurrencies as security. As of May 2022, the company had lent out $8 billion to clients and had almost $12 billion in assets under management.

Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm, co-founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara MacAulay. In November 2022, FTX, Alameda's sister cryptocurrency exchange, experienced a solvency crisis, and both FTX and Alameda filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That same month, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that FTX had lent more than half of its customers' funds to Alameda, which was explicitly forbidden by FTX's terms-of-service.

The bankruptcy of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, began in November 2022. The collapse of FTX, caused by a spike in customer withdrawals that exposed an $8 billion hole in FTX's accounts, served as the impetus for its bankruptcy. Prior to its collapse, FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and had over one million users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erik Voorhees</span> American cryptocurrency entrepreneur

Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. He also co-founded Satoshi Dice and was the Director of Marketing at BitInstant. He has been referred to as a crypto-libertarian and has advocated for "the separation of money and state" and views Bitcoin as a tool for decentralizing financial power and challenging government control over currency.

References

  1. 1 2 Nina Bambysheva (July 24, 2023). "This Startup Wants To Deanonymize Blockchain. Privacy Advocates Are Furious". Forbes. Retrieved April 21, 2024.
  2. ↑ Maria Gracia Santillana Linares (July 14, 2022). "Celsius Seeks Bankruptcy Protection After Reclaiming Collateral". Forbes. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
  3. ↑ Nina Bambysheva (July 13, 2022). "Celsius Has Paid Its Debts To DeFi's Biggest Lenders, Reclaiming Over $1 Billion In Collateral". Forbes. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
  4. ↑ Bryce Elder (July 8, 2022). "Crypto lender Celsius sued by its own 'hapless' money manager". Financial Times. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
  5. ↑ Nina Bambysheva (November 21, 2022). "FTX Hacker Moved Nearly $200 Million Of Ether To Different Wallets". Forbes. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
  6. 1 2 Allyson Versprille; Ava Benny-Morrison (December 30, 2022). "US Is Said to Examine Crypto Wallets Linked to Sam Bankman-Fried". Bloomberg. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
  7. ↑ Brian Evans (December 29, 2022). "Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research sells $1.7 million in crypto amid bankruptcy and still holds over $112 million in tokens". Markets Insider. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
  8. ↑ Rohan Goswami; MacKenzie Sigalos (January 19, 2023). "Binance was final destination for millions in funds from Bitzlato, exchange shut down for alleged money laundering". CNBC. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
  9. ↑ Chittum, Morgan (January 13, 2023). "Alameda liquidators just lost $72,000 on a DeFi lending platform while trying to recover funds for creditors, analytics firm says". Markets Insider. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
  10. ↑ Nina Bambysheva (July 24, 2023). "This Startup Wants To Deanonymize Blockchain. Privacy Advocates Are Furious". Forbes. Retrieved June 21, 2024.
  11. ↑ "Arkham USD". Yahoo News. Retrieved July 8, 2024.
  12. ↑ "Arkham". Forbes. Retrieved July 8, 2024.
  13. ↑ Margaret Hartmann (June 21, 2024). "Did Barron Trump Really Launch a DJT Crypto Coin With Martin Shkreli?". New York Mag. Retrieved October 5, 2024.
  14. ↑ Olga Kharif (July 12, 2024). "Germany Appears to Finish Bitcoin Sales, Data Tracker Arkham Says". Bloomberg. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  15. ↑ Ryan Browne (July 8, 2023). "The German government owns around $2 billion in bitcoin — and it's freaking out crypto investors". CNBC. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  16. ↑ Matthew Fox (July 5, 2024). "Bitcoin plummets as $9 billion Mt. Gox payout begins and government selling adds pressure". Markets Insider. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  17. ↑ Benjamin Taubman; Olga Kharif (July 5, 2024). "Bitcoin's Lingering Mt. Gox Overhang Leaves Market in a State of Suspense". Bloomberg. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  18. ↑ Sidhartha Shukla (May 28, 2024). "Bitcoin Retreats as Traders Mull Risk of Sales Linked to Mt. Gox". Bloomberg. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  19. ↑ Adam Clark (May 28, 2024). "Bitcoin Slips. Why the Market Is Nervous". Barron's. Retrieved October 28, 2024.
  20. ↑ Joe Light (August 28, 2023). "Robinhood Is a Bitcoin Whale. What It Means for the Stock". Barrons. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
  21. ↑ Nina Bambysheva (February 27, 2023). "Liquid Staking Takes DeFi By Storm With $240 Million Lido Inflow, Apparently From Justin Sun". Forbes. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
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