Cryptocurrency compliance company Elliptic has released the Elliptic Data Set, which aims to identify crypto transactions associated with money laundering.
Elliptic collaborated with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the data set, which was taken from 200,000 bitcoin transactions worth $6 billion — the largest set of labeled transaction data publicly available in any digital currency in the world.
The study, detailed in the paper “Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experiments with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics,” explains how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to identify illicit transactions, as well as transactions associated with money laundering, sanctions violations or terrorist financing.
The research found that only 2 percent of the 200,000 bitcoin transactions in the data set were illicit, while 21 percent were identified as lawful. However, the majority of the transactions, around 77 percent, remained unclassified.
“A big problem with compliance, in general, is false positives. A big part of this research is minimizing the number of false positives,” Elliptic Co-Founder Tom Robinson told CoinDesk. “The key finding is that machine learning techniques are very effective at finding transactions that are illicit.”
Now Elliptic has made the data set public in an effort to obtain open-source contributions.
“On the AML side, we are sharing our early experiments with domain experts to solicit feedback,” MIT researcher Mark Weber said, adding, “We are also hoping the release of the Elliptic Data Set inspires others to join the effort to help make our financial systems safer by developing new techniques and models for AML.”
And Busan has issued a “regulation-free” zone for blockchain development by South Korea’s national government.
On July 24, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced that Busan will host a range of blockchain offerings related to finance, public safety and tourism. As a result, 11 regulations have been lifted for the project. Initial coin offerings (ICOs), however, will not be allowed, and the planned stablecoin will be highly limited in its use.
CoinDesk reported that investors are expected to move 29.9 billion won ($25 million) into the region by 2021, with development spread between the Munhyeon Innovation District, the Centum Innovation District and the Dongsam Innovation District.
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