The United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has requested a subscription to use Chainalysis Inc’s analytics tools. 

A public notice sent out yesterday announced OFAC’s desire to subscribe to Chainalysis’s Training and Support Packages for what they deem as “mission-critical research.” The financial intelligence agency is looking to fill its need for a “commercial online blockchain tracing web-based application.”

OFAC oversees the implementation of U.S. international sanctions and spearheads the government’s enforcement of them. The office works to root out money laundering offenders and terrorist entities operating within its jurisdiction.

The requested application will be used by investigators in the Office of Global Targeting (OGT) in order to properly analyze and monitor virtual currency transactions. The app will allow the OGT to collect what they refer to as “attribution information” on people that the office is looking to add to the Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN).  

The report points out that Chainalysis Rumker licenses include Observations and Nodes, which will give OFAC the ability to locate where exactly specific serve nodes are running. The requested aid would go far in helping support cyber sanctions implementations that OFAC is responsible for.

Yesterday’s public notice marks the second such request that OFAC has made this month. Earlier in May, OFAC made a request for Chainalysis to aid in providing address clustering options, wallet explorer tools, and transaction flow mapping.

Additionally, the tools must provide a breakdown of user behavior along with exchange rate, trade, and market data. The tools requested would be to “support cyber sanctions implementation undertaken by OFAC.” The request specified that OFAC would prefer to incorporate multiple tools to effectively “corroborate attribution of cyber actors, sufficient to meet legal requirements for use as evidence in OFAC designations determinations.” 

Chainalysis is a blockchain analysis company that provides software and research to a number of federal agencies, exchanges, and institutions. They operate in more than 50 countries worldwide and power investigation and risk management tools aimed at combating cybercriminal cases. 

Just recently, the Internal Revenue Service Digital Forensic team revealed it was looking into cracking tools for crypto wallets to “tame the cybersecurity research into measured, repeatable, consistent digital forensics processes.”

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