Mastercard’s CipherTrace reportedly discontinues some of its services amid data verifiability concerns

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Mastercard’s blockchain forensic firm CipherTrace has reportedly halted some of its key services amid concerns over data reliability.

CipherTrace, a blockchain analytics firm acquired by Mastercard in 2021, appears to be discontinuing some of its key services, Fortune has learned, citing sources familiar with the matter. While the exact reason behind the move remains unclear, the California-based blockchain firm appears to have suspended the following services:

• Armada, a tool that helps banks, payment providers, and regulators uncover virtual currency-related transactions for use in risk and fraud models by mapping legal names and account numbers to exchanges.
• Inspector, a repository of attribution data ties crypto-addresses to real-world organizations, sanctioned entities, IP addresses, and events.
• Sentry, a tool designed to track in real-time “know your transaction” (KYT) for compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CFT) regulations.

The report highlights that this recent development follows Mastercard’s decision to retract the expert testimony of Jonelle Still, CipherTrace’s Director of Investigations and Intelligence, in the Bitcoin Fog case. Still had previously stated that Chainalysis’ attributions were “unverifiable” and criticized the prosecution’s investigation as “massively incomplete.”

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However, Mastercard later withdrew Still’s testimony, asserting that the data she relied on was “unverifiable and unauditable,” originating from pre-acquisition data collection practices, Fortune pointed out. Crypto.news reached out to CipherTrace for comment and will update the article if we hear back.

Earlier findings by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) reveal substantial variations in blockchain data mapping among different on-chain analytics providers.

In July 2021, FATF issued a report comparing peer-to-peer transaction data from seven blockchain analysis firms: Chainalysis, CipherTrace, Coinfirm, Elliptic, Merkle Science, Scorechain, and TRM Labs. The comparison highlighted significant discrepancies in the data provided by these companies, leading FATF to acknowledge the challenge of drawing definitive conclusions from the presented graphs.

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