Community-driven platform powered by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs
San Francisco, CA — May 18, 2022 – TRM Labs, the leader in blockchain intelligence solutions, along with crypto industry leaders including Circle, Solana Foundation, The Aave Companies, Hedera, Binance.US and Civic, have today announced the launch of a new community-powered scam reporting platform, Chainabuse, which empowers anyone in the crypto economy to warn others about scams, hacks or other fraudulent activity as they encounter it. The free tool enables crypto users, victims of financial crimes, and crypto businesses to take an active role in making the crypto ecosystem a safer place to operate.
Despite current volatility, the cryptocurrency industry has grown considerably over the last few years, peaking at a $3 trillion market cap in 2021. But as adoption has increased, so too has the rate of hacks and scams targeting crypto users. Warnings of scams are often reported on social media sites such as Twitter or Discord, but these posts can be difficult to validate, consolidate or track over time.
Chainabuse is the first purpose-built platform of its kind – a multi-chain reporting tool that allows crypto users to report illicit activity to a public forum where others can upvote, downvote or leave comments to contribute additional information. Reports on the same addresses or entities are consolidated and housed in a searchable database, which anyone can use to proactively check addresses or projects before engaging with them.
“In numerous recent attacks and instances of malicious activity, we have already seen the crypto community’s potential to come together to root out bad actors and help protect each other, “ said Joe McGill, former U.S. Secret Service and Postal Investigator, now part of the global investigations team at TRM and one of Chainabuse’s chief architects. “Chainabuse was designed to make it easier for more people to play an active role in advancing that culture and ensure that the spirit of community remains one of crypto’s most powerful attributes.”
The platform is powered by the crypto community and supported by leading crypto businesses, protocols, and foundations committed to making the crypto ecosystem a safe and trusted environment. Chainabuse provides partner crypto platform operators with a consolidated view of illicit activity reports from users, allowing them to identify prevalent, legitimate complaints and launch investigations more quickly.
“Chainabuse significantly enhances the depth and effectiveness of our compliance monitoring program by leveraging an aggregated view of the distributed efforts of the entire crypto community,” said Mandeep Walia, Chief Compliance and Risk Officer at Circle.
“The safety and security of web3 users is our top priority. Working with TRM Labs will enable us to reduce scams and hacks, which have cost people millions of dollars. Chainabuse will allow us to work together with industry partners to promote a better environment for the next million participants of DeFi and web3,” said Stani Kulechov, CEO of Aave.
“TRM Labs is the industry go-to for blockchain investigations, and Chainabuse fills a missing part of a more trusted ecosystem with much-needed resources for scam victims,” said Chris Hart, CEO of Civic. “We’re proud to forge a partnership with TRM Labs and build more intelligence into the investigative process together.”
“DLT and crypto requires a higher level of trust for more mainstream adoption, and tangible safety measures to protect consumers and users,” said Sam Brylski, Regulatory Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer for Hedera. “We are pleased to work with other industry leaders to deliver a multi-chain, community-driven, and freely available platform that lets users report and be warned about hacks, scams, and fraudulent activity, raising transparency for all.”
The platform launches publicly today with hundreds of reports available to search across eight blockchains – including over 100 scams related to Ukraine crypto fundraising campaigns and over 20 phishing domains and Twitter profiles targeting investors in a popular new gamified metaverse project.
“The latent fear of inadvertently investing in a rugpull – or being hacked – hampers mainstream crypto adoption and reinforces the call for industry-led solutions to consumer and investor protections,” said Esteban Castano, Co-founder and CEO of TRM Labs. “Chainabuse is the latest extension of TRM’s mission to build a safer and more trusted financial system for billions of people and we are proud to partner with leaders in the crypto industry to expand its impact and reach.”
How to support Chainabuse
Chainabuse is the first multi-chain, community-powered crypto scam reporting tool and is available for anyone to use for free. Organizations who are interested in becoming an official Chainabuse partner or want to learn more about scams reported on their platforms can contact the Chainabuse team at TRM Labs: chainabuse@trmlabs.com.
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About TRM Labs
TRM provides blockchain intelligence to help financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses and public agencies detect, investigate and manage crypto-related fraud and financial crime. TRM’s risk management platform includes solutions for cryptocurrency anti-money laundering (AML), transaction monitoring and wallet screening, entity risk scoring including Know-Your-VASP, and transaction tracing for investigations. These tools enable a rapidly growing cohort of organizations around the world to safely embrace cryptocurrency-related transactions, products, and partnerships. TRM is based in San Francisco, CA and is hiring across engineering, product, sales, and data science. To learn more, visit www.trmlabs.com.
About Civic Technologies
Civic is a leading provider of identity management tools for Web3, empowering people to easily and privately manage their identities across chains with an on-chain representation of their reusable identity. The company’s flagship product, Civic Pass, is an integrated permissioning tool that helps business customers enable secure access to their on-chain assets. Users may also manage their Web3 identity, presence and reputation with a dashboard. Civic aims to be the most trusted on-chain Web3 identity tool in the world, used by billions every day. Civic was co-founded in 2015 by Vinny Lingham and Jonathan Smith