In the world of cryptocurrency, innovation never sleeps. From DeFi to NFTs, the ecosystem has grown rapidly — but so too has its shadow: financial crime.
Welcome to the first post in our five-part series on Tracking Blockchain Crimes and Cross-Chain Crimes. Drawing from the landmark 2025 report by Elliptic, we’ll explore the evolving threats that exist across blockchain networks, and how law enforcement, regulators, and investigative firms like ours can meet this growing challenge.
🌐 The Cross-Chain Shift
In the early days of crypto crime, bad actors relied on mixing services or simple peer-to-peer transfers to mask their activity. Today, they exploit something much more advanced — cross-chain infrastructure. Using bridges, DEXs, and coin swap services, criminals can quickly shift funds between blockchains, confusing the trail and complicating efforts to follow the money.
Elliptic’s data tells a stark story: over $21.8 billion in illicit or high-risk assets have been laundered using cross-chain methods — a threefold increase since 2023. And it’s not just elite hackers or rogue nation-states. From darknet dealers to meme coin rug-pullers, cross-chain laundering is becoming the norm, not the exception.
🔁 What Is “Chain-Hopping”?
A key tactic in this new world is chain-hopping: rapidly swapping assets across multiple blockchains to obscure the origin of funds. The complexity and speed of these swaps are designed to outpace investigators, many of whom are still using tools built for single-chain analysis.
Imagine tracking a theft on Ethereum, only to have the funds move to Arbitrum, then Base, then Tron — all within minutes. That’s the scale of complexity facing financial crime units today.
🛠️ The Tools to Fight Back
But there’s hope. Companies like Elliptic are pioneering tools that can automate cross-chain tracing, leveraging “virtual value transfer events” (VVTEs) to map funds as they move from chain to chain. With coverage across 50+ blockchains, this tech is already changing the game for investigators.
At BlockDivers, our forensic team is building on these tools — combining cross-chain analytics with AI and OSINT to uncover patterns even in complex, high-velocity laundering schemes.
🔍 Why This Series Matters
This blog series will dive deep into:
- The tactics used by cybercriminals and nation-state actors
- The role of decentralized exchanges and anonymous swap services
- Real-world case studies, including the North Korean Bybit hack
- The future of blockchain compliance and asset recovery
Our mission: to shed light on the dark corners of the blockchain and share the practical steps investigators can take today.
Stay tuned for Post 2, where we’ll dissect the anatomy of a cross-chain laundering operation and the forensic methods used to unwind it.
