Partner Spotlight: Chainalysis Q&A with economist Ethan McMahon

Chainalysis is a comprehensive data platform that helps organisations build out their crypto compliance strategies. Government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cyber security companies in over 60 countries rely on the firm’s data for everything from fulfilling regulatory obligations to simply navigating the cryptocurrency ecosystem with more confidence.

We spoke to economist Ethan McMahon about the firm’s research and what he believes will be the most important issues for crypto in the coming years.

Chainalysis brands itself as “building trust in blockchains”, but I think a lot of people see trust as fundamental to blockchain. So what do you mean by that?

It’s actually pretty fascinating because one of the biggest misconceptions about cryptocurrency is that it's totally anonymous or untraceable. In fact, it’s actually quite the opposite. Cryptocurrency presents unprecedented transparency. It represents the first global payment solution outside of any one organisation’s control, and crypto blockchains create a permanent public record of transactions. The real challenge is that the public blockchain ledger is difficult to interpret, and that's where we come in.