Crypto compliance at scale: Coinbase Tracer and Know Your Transaction API

As crypto becomes increasingly mainstream, our mission to bring economic freedom to the world by powering a crypto ecosystem accessible to all is more important than ever. A crucial factor to accessibility is helping ensure everyone can safely and appropriately participate in the cryptoeconomy while also keeping pace with evolving global regulations — a challenge Coinbase is particularly experienced with.

The trust of our users relies on the application of compliance standards designed to meet the expectations of regulators. As a result, we’ve spent years engineering solutions that assist with our compliance obligations; many of these same needs are shared by our clients.

Today, we are excited to share some of the tools we’ve developed in an effort to address the compliance needs of financial institutions, crypto businesses, law enforcement agencies, and corporations new to crypto. We are introducing a new product, Coinbase Know Your Transaction (KYT) and providing an update of our existing product, Coinbase Analytics. Together, these offerings form a suite of crypto compliance products designed to help secure the crypto economy from bad actors.

Introducing Coinbase KYT (Know Your Transaction)

As the largest regulated exchange in the US, it has been critical for us to work on the development of safeguards against bad actors. After years of collecting signals about how to determine if an entity or transaction is facilitating illegal activity, we developed Coinbase KYT to help businesses and institutions better mitigate risk on their own platforms through our API. Coinbase KYT is a transaction screening tool that financial institutions and crypto businesses can use to proactively manage risk based on our proprietary risk scoring system.

Using Coinbase KYT API, businesses can:

• Automate real-time transaction monitoring for millions of transactions by generating risk scores for addresses

• Receive alerts to enable proactive risk management if there are changes to risk profiles

• Easily configure rule engines and unique risk insights into existing third party case management tools

• Screen transactions for anti terror financing and other AML-related flags at scale

To learn more about Coinbase KYT, contact our sales team for a demo.

Coinbase Analytics is now Coinbase Tracer

Coinbase Analytics was originally utilized as an internal tool to help leverage our first-party transactions data and strong analytics capabilities to mitigate risk on our own exchange as we scaled our business. Today, it remains a cornerstone in our compliance team’s day-to-day operations and is widely used by governments and law enforcement due to its industry leading nature. Experiencing the challenges of crypto compliance firsthand has pushed our teams to build a product we’re confident offering to other scaled organizations.

Here are a few key features:

• Link activity to real-world entities and visualize the flow of funds using public attribution data

• Reduce fraud, demystify counterparty risk, and help flag AML risks with sophisticated risk scores and alerts

• Identify action points for intervention with seamless integrations with other case management tools and transaction monitoring systems

• Utilize product capabilities designed in partnership with our world-class investigations team

After many evolutions, we realized Coinbase Analytics is capable of analysis and much more, which is why we’re changing the name to Coinbase Tracer. We’ve also updated our user interface to be more user friendly, visually engaging, and in-line with our other Coinbase products. We look forward to working with our clients to continue building a world-class investigations solution with more updates coming soon.

To learn more about Coinbase Tracer, contact our sales team for a demo.

The cryptoeconomy is growing at an incredible pace, and only continues to accelerate. At Coinbase, we’ve championed the importance of growing the crypto market in a fair and compliant manner in order to fuel innovation and expand economic freedom for everyone. We look forward to meeting the compliance opportunities of the future with more products and features that help to ensure that everyone can securely participate in the crypto economy.

Legal disclosures

This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.

Crypto is a new type of asset. Besides potential day to day or hour to hour volatility, each crypto asset has unique features. Make sure you research and understand individual assets before you transact.

All images provided herein are by Coinbase.