Huobi, the exchange that has been accused of allowing exchange hackers to launder their proceeds in the past, has launched Star Atlas, a blockchain analysis tool that aims to “monitor on-chain cryptocurrency transactions for illicit activities.” The Singapore-based group was a major destination for illicit funds in 2019, with over 50% of illicit cryptocurrency sold through itself and Binance last year, and it will hope that its invention will help reduce the amount of illicit funds flowing through its gates.
Real Time Blockchain Analysis
Huobi announced Star Atlas through a press release on Monday, stating that the new tool “underscores Huobi’s efforts to expand its security measures beyond local requirements and contribute to the fight against nefarious uses of cryptocurrencies on a global scale.”
Star Atlas will monitor cryptocurrency transactions to help identify high risk behaviors and detect crimes such as fraud and money laundering by analyzing on-chain cryptocurrency activities in real time and flagging suspicious or problematic transactions.
Any suspicious activities will be flagged up and sent for further examination, where blockchain security experts will examine asset flow as well as performing event correlation analysis, identity authentication, and malicious address labelling in order to determine illicit activity.
Blacklist Address Library
Star Atlas has already amassed a library with “tens of millions of tags and tens of thousands of blacklisted addresses”, including addresses linked to dark web activity, which is updated automatically and will allow for quicker and more efficient detection of malicious activity. Huobi will also integrate its existing KYC data with Star Atlas in order to quickly identify bad actors and take the appropriate action.
Huobi says that the technology behind Star Atlas, which it has designed itself, has been a year in the making and is “based on years of intelligence gathered by the crypto industry’s leading security experts.” The move will be welcomed by those who are pushing for more security in the crypto space and goes hand in hand with broader efforts to regulate the space by government bodies, which others see as opposite to the crypto spirit.
