What is Chainalysis and what does it do?

Chainalysis is a blockchain analytics company. It is not a cryptocurrency and has no token, so people asking what Chainalysis crypto is usually mean the company behind many crypto crime investigations. Its software turns raw blockchain records into maps of who paid whom, and labels addresses that belong to exchanges, scams, hackers or sanctioned groups.

What is Chainalysis used for?

The company says it serves government agencies, crypto businesses and financial institutions in more than 70 countries, with over 1,500 customers. Jonathan Levin co-founded it in 2014. Its customers include:

• Government. Law enforcement, national security agencies, regulators and tax authorities use it to trace stolen or illicit funds.
• Exchanges and crypto firms. They use it to meet anti-money laundering and sanctions duties, described in crypto anti-money laundering rules.
• Banks and custodians that handle crypto for clients.

Chainalysis also publishes widely quoted yearly estimates of crypto crime. The broader field is explained in what is crypto forensics.

What is Chainalysis Reactor?

Reactor is the company's investigation tool. Chainalysis says it follows funds from a first deposit to a final cash-out across more than 27 blockchains, including through swaps, bridges, decentralized exchanges and popular mixers. Investigators see the flow as a graph, add notes and off-chain evidence, and share findings with colleagues or courts.

The key feature is attribution, meaning linking a wallet to a real organization or service. Once traced funds reach a known exchange, investigators can ask that exchange, through legal process, who owns the account.

What is Chainalysis KYT?

KYT stands for Know Your Transaction. It is a compliance tool that checks the risk of crypto entering and leaving a platform. Chainalysis says it sends alerts within seconds of an on-chain transaction, so a team can block or review it, and it flags direct or indirect exposure to risky or sanctioned entities. The company lists Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit and eToro among KYT users. Screening against sanctions lists is covered in what are OFAC crypto sanctions.

Is Chainalysis evidence reliable?

It has been tested in court. Before the 2024 trial of Roman Sterlingov, accused of running the bitcoin mixer Bitcoin Fog, his lawyers argued Reactor had not been peer reviewed and had no known error rate. The federal court in Washington, DC let FBI and Chainalysis experts testify anyway, noting that the underlying methods had academic support, that results were checked by manual tracing and other software, and that other evidence backed the case. The jury convicted him in March 2024.

On September 25, 2026, a federal appeals court upheld his convictions and sentence, Cointelegraph reported. The case shows that defendants can challenge such tools, and that the trial court weighed the tracing alongside other evidence rather than on its own.

Laws on crypto tracing and financial privacy differ by country and change often.