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This is an interview with\u00a0Jonathan Levin, the\u00a0co-founder and CEO\u00a0of\u00a0<\/em>Chainalysis<\/em><\/a>, a leading blockchain data platform used by over 1,500\u00a0 government agencies and financial institutions to track cryptocurrency transactions and combat illicit activity conducted by\u00a0<\/em>Selva Ozelli<\/em><\/a>\u00a0exclusively for crypto.news. Jonathan Levin officially assumed the role of CEO in December 2024, succeeding fellow co-founder Michael Gronager.<\/em><\/p>\n Under his leadership, Chainalysis has recently focused on expanding its presence in regions like\u00a0Tel Aviv\u00a0and\u00a0Dubai, while ramping up M&A activity with acquisitions like\u00a0Transposer, Nash, Hexagate, and Alterya.\u00a0Before becoming CEO, Levin served as the company\u2019s\u00a0Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)\u00a0for nearly a decade, leading strategic initiatives, regulatory outreach, and government affairs. <\/em><\/p>\n Prior to Chainalysis, he co-founded and served as CEO of\u00a0Coinometrics, which provided some of the industry\u2019s first blockchain intelligence dashboards. Levin is a prominent voice in the cryptocurrency industry, frequently providing expert insights to policymakers.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n He has testified before the\u00a0U.S. Senate Banking Committee\u00a0and the\u00a0House Financial Services Committee\u00a0multiple times, most recently in July 2025, regarding the role of digital assets in illicit finance. He is a mentor for the\u00a0Techstars\u00a0Alchemist Blockchain accelerator and frequently appears on TV, on platforms like\u00a0C-SPAN,\u00a0to discuss blockchain security and adoption.<\/em><\/p>\n \n Summary<\/span>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1. Tell us about your educational and career path that led you to working at Chainalysis<\/strong><\/p>\n I studied economics at Oxford, where I got obsessed with a simple question: how do financial systems actually evolve, and what role does data play in making them work?<\/p>\n I got into Bitcoin early \u2014 not as a speculator, but as someone fascinated by the economics of it. Here was a transparent financial system, every transaction visible on a public ledger, and yet almost nobody could interpret what was actually happening. Crypto businesses couldn\u2019t get bank accounts because they had no way to demonstrate compliance. Law enforcement couldn\u2019t trace funds. Regulators couldn\u2019t assess risk.<\/p>\n That gap \u2014 between transparency in theory and opacity in practice \u2014 was the founding insight. Together with my co-founders, we realized that whoever built the data and intelligence layer for blockchains would become essential infrastructure. That\u2019s what Chainalysis became.<\/p>\n What\u2019s changed since then is the scale of the opportunity. Ten years ago, we were explaining what blockchain was. Today, we\u2019re building the trust layer for a world where AI agents will be transacting autonomously on-chain. The core problem \u2014 making sense of complex financial flows and identifying risk \u2014 hasn\u2019t changed. But the speed, volume, and sophistication of what we need to analyze have increased by orders of magnitude.\u00a0<\/p>\n 2. Tell us about the vision that led to the establishment of Chainalysis<\/strong><\/p>\n We founded Chainalysis in 2014 because we saw that blockchain technology had a trust problem \u2014 and that trust problem was a data problem.<\/p>\n The catalyst was Mt. Gox. In early 2014, the largest crypto exchange collapsed after 650,000 bitcoins were stolen. It was a transparent system \u2014 every transaction was on a public ledger \u2014 but nobody could interpret what had happened. Funds were moving, and there was no reliable way to trace them.<\/p>\n So, we built the tools. We analyzed the Mt. Gox flows and determined that the exchange\u2019s hot wallet keys had been compromised years earlier, with funds siphoned steadily over time. That work contributed to the identification and arrest of Alexander Vinnik, who was charged with laundering stolen funds through BTC-e.<\/p>\n That case proved the thesis: if crypto was going to scale, it needed infrastructure for trust. Not just compliance checkboxes \u2014 real intelligence that could support investigations, protect consumers, and give institutions the confidence to participate.<\/p>\n 3. Tell us about Chainalysis\u2019s technology and business model for tracing digital assets on blockchains.<\/strong><\/p>\n At the core, we\u2019re a data company. We take raw blockchain data from across networks and transform it into actionable intelligence \u2014 grouping related addresses, applying proprietary analysis, and combining on-chain data with off-chain information to link activity to real-world entities.<\/p>\n That intelligence powers everything. Investigators use it to build cases and trace funds across wallets and chains. Compliance teams use it to monitor activity, screen counterparties, and manage exposure to sanctioned or high-risk entities. The results are measurable \u2014 our tools have helped freeze or recover over $34 billion in illicit funds.<\/p>\n Anyone can build a dashboard. What can\u2019t be replicated is the proprietary data we\u2019ve built over a decade \u2014 the entity mappings, the behavioral models, the relationships with governments and institutions in 60+ countries that feed our intelligence. Independent researchers at TU Delft evaluated blockchain analytics providers and found our data had the highest accuracy, broadest coverage, and lowest false-positive rates.\u00a0<\/p>\n Where this is heading is equally important. We\u2019ve recently introduced blockchain intelligence agents \u2014 AI-powered capabilities built on top of our data platform. These agents can analyze complex transaction flows, enrich alerts, and generate investigative leads in minutes instead of hours. They\u2019re not generic AI tools \u2014 they\u2019re grounded in our proprietary data and designed for regulated environments where explainability and auditability are non-negotiable.<\/p>\n The way I think about it: our data is the foundation, the platform delivers it, and increasingly, AI agents are the interface. We\u2019re moving from a world where humans query our platform to one where AI agents work alongside investigators and compliance teams, scaling expertise across entire organizations.<\/p>\n 4. Can Chainalysis trace mixer coins or privacy-focused coins?<\/strong><\/p>\n While we don\u2019t disclose the specific techniques we use to analyze mixers or privacy-enhancing technologies, we can say that blockchain transparency still provides meaningful investigative leads.<\/p>\n 5. Chainalysis is heavily used by world financial regulators and public and private institutions to ensure compliance with Financial Action Task Force (FAFT) standards.\u00a0Tell us about Chainalysis\u2019s customers and services.<\/strong><\/p>\n We serve more than 1,500 customers globally \u2014 government agencies, regulators, law enforcement, financial institutions, crypto businesses, and increasingly, enterprises that are engaging with digital assets for the first time.<\/p>\n The common thread is that every one of these organizations needs to operate with confidence in an environment that\u2019s evolving fast. We provide a blockchain intelligence platform that combines large-scale on-chain data with advanced analytics to help them investigate illicit activity, manage risk, and meet regulatory obligations.<\/p>\n Ultimately, our role is to provide the infrastructure that enables organizations to engage with crypto confidently while protecting consumers and the broader financial system.<\/p>\n 6. Does Chainalysis get hired by individuals who have been hacked?\u00a0 If not, who should individual investors who have been harmed by crypto crime turn to?<\/strong><\/p>\n We work with public- and private-sector organizations, not individuals directly. If someone suspects they\u2019ve been hacked, the most important thing is speed \u2014 contact local law enforcement immediately and notify any platforms involved, such as exchanges or wallet providers. The faster you act, the better the chances of tracing and potentially recovering funds.<\/p>\n What I\u2019d add is that the tools available to law enforcement have gotten dramatically better. A decade ago, tracing stolen crypto was a manual, painstaking process. Today, with AI-powered investigative tools, agencies can follow complex fund flows across chains and through obfuscation techniques much faster than before. That\u2019s a meaningful shift in the odds for victims.<\/p>\n 7. FATF cites Chainalysis report indicating that in 2025, illicit digital asset activity reached a record high of approximately\u00a0$154\u2013$158 billion, with Stablecoins used in majority of these illicit transactions.\u00a0 Tell us about your report\u2019s findings and why Stablecoins?<\/strong><\/p>\n Our latest Crypto Crime Report, which analyzes activity in 2025, shows that illicit transaction volume reached approximately $154\u2013$158 billion. While that figure reflects the continued evolution of the threat landscape, it\u2019s important to note that illicit activity still accounts for a very small share of total crypto transaction volume.<\/p>\n On stablecoins specifically \u2014 this isn\u2019t surprising, and it shouldn\u2019t be alarming in the way people might initially read it. Stablecoins have become the dominant medium for on-chain transactions, period. They\u2019re fast, they\u2019re stable, they\u2019re efficient for cross-border movement. So of course, illicit actors use them \u2014 they use whatever the market uses. That\u2019s always been the pattern.<\/p>\n The good news is every transaction is on a public ledger. The issuers can freeze assets. The data trail is rich. So, while the shift to stablecoins creates new challenges in terms of volume and speed, it also creates enormous opportunities for detection and disruption \u2014 if you have the right data and the right tools. That\u2019s where we come in.<\/p>\n The real question isn\u2019t \u201cwhy stablecoins?\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s \u201care we building the intelligence infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with how quickly value is moving on-chain?\u201d That\u2019s what we\u2019re focused on.<\/p>\n 8. What are the latest trends in crypto crime?<\/strong><\/p>\n Three things stand out to me.<\/p>\n First, nation-states. This is no longer a fringe concern. In 2025, we saw state actors \u2014 and I\u2019m talking about sophisticated, well-resourced governments \u2014 systematically leveraging blockchain infrastructure to evade sanctions and move funds at scale. This is a fundamentally different threat than a ransomware gang or a darknet market. It requires a fundamentally different level of intelligence to counter.<\/p>\n Second, professionalization. Crypto crime has industrialized. You now have service-based ecosystems \u2014 laundering-as-a-service, infrastructure providers, brokers \u2014 that function like the back office of a criminal enterprise. It mirrors what happened in traditional financial crime over decades, but it\u2019s happening on a compressed timeline because the technology moves faster.<\/p>\n Third \u2014 and this is one of the most significant findings in our 2026 report \u2014 the rise of Chinese-language money-laundering networks. These networks processed $16.1 billion in illicit crypto in 2025. That\u2019s roughly $44 million a day across nearly 1,800 wallets, and they now facilitate around 20% of known illicit crypto laundering globally. They operate through forums, Telegram channels, and escrow-style marketplaces, and they\u2019ve become the connective tissue linking disparate forms of cybercrime worldwide. This is not a regional problem \u2014 it\u2019s a global infrastructure problem.<\/p>\n The throughline across all three trends is scale and speed. The criminals are scaling. The question is whether the defenders \u2014 governments, financial institutions, platforms \u2014 are scaling their intelligence capabilities at the same rate. That\u2019s the race we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n 9. Chainalysis recently\u00a0<\/strong>announced<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0the first blockchain intelligence agents designed to help organizations and investigators keep pace with the explosive rise of AI-enabled crypto crime.\u00a0 Tell us more about this.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is one of the most important things we\u2019ve done as a company, and it connects directly to where we see the entire market heading.<\/p>\n Let me frame the problem first. AI has fundamentally changed the economics of crypto crime. It\u2019s lowered the barrier to entry, it\u2019s increased the speed and sophistication of attacks, and it\u2019s enabled criminal operations to scale in ways that weren\u2019t possible even two years ago. Scams that used to require human operators can now be automated. Social engineering that used to target individuals can now target thousands simultaneously. The attack surface has exploded.<\/p>\n The defense side has to evolve just as fast \u2014 and honestly, faster. That\u2019s what our blockchain intelligence agents are about.<\/p>\n These aren\u2019t chatbots bolted onto a dashboard. They\u2019re AI agents built on top of our proprietary data \u2014 more than a decade of blockchain intelligence, attribution, and investigative expertise \u2014 designed to work alongside human investigators and compliance teams. They can trace complex transaction flows, enrich alerts, identify patterns, and surface actionable intelligence in minutes instead of hours or days. And critically, every output is auditable and explainable. In regulated environments, that\u2019s non-negotiable.<\/p>\n What makes this defensible is the data. You can build an AI agent on top of public data and get a mediocre result. You build it on top of the deepest, most comprehensive blockchain intelligence dataset in the world \u2014 which is what we have \u2014 and you get something that actually works at the level these problems demand. The data is the moat. The agents are how we make that moat accessible to every analyst, every investigator, every compliance officer, regardless of their level of blockchain expertise.<\/p>\n This is also a window into where we\u2019re heading more broadly. We\u2019re entering an era where agents \u2014 not just criminal agents, but legitimate commercial agents \u2014 will be transacting autonomously on-chain. The volume, speed, and complexity of on-chain activity is going to increase by orders of magnitude. Human-only workflows won\u2019t keep up. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that pair human judgment with AI-powered intelligence. That\u2019s what we\u2019re building toward.<\/p>\n 10. How can people reach you?<\/strong><\/p>\n You can learn more about Chainalysis and our work at\u00a0chainalysis.com<\/a>, where we regularly publish research and insights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n