August 2024 Product Highlights: Unlocking More Comprehensive Insights

August was a busy month—we unveiled a series of important product updates for general availability that provide a more comprehensive view of risk and threat exposure, an easier start to your investigations, and more precise visibility into the changes to asset balances on Ethereum. These updates underscore our commitment to continually improving our solutions to better serve our customers.

Here’s a look at some of what’s new at TRM Labs.

Automatically detect and trace indirect exposure across chains

When threat actors engage in chain-hopping—moving funds across blockchains via bridge protocols—it complicates investigators' efforts to trace the final source and destination of the funds.

Over two years ago, TRM responded to this emerging trend by being the first blockchain intelligence company to integrate cross-chain bridge transactions into our platform. With over 150+ bridge protocols across 30 blockchains (and growing), TRM has unmatched coverage—including historical data—of bridge protocols, making it an indispensable asset for investigators who are faced with prosecuting increasingly sophisticated threat actors and money laundering techniques.

Today, we are extending this innovation with another industry first: automatic cross-chain indirect exposure. This capability accelerates the ability to identify the source and destination of funds by automatically following the money across multiple blockchains, regardless of the number of bridges used.

Unlike manual tracing methods that require investigators to plot individual swaps to identify the source and destination of funds, TRM’s cross-chain tracing automatically “follows the money” on behalf of investigators, and surfaces insights as part of the Total Incoming and Outgoing exposure.

For investigators, cross-chain indirect exposure allows you to follow the money 10x faster, and improves the quality of investigations by avoiding potential missed leads. As always, TRM’s unique multi-path routing capability keeps the investigator in control, allowing them to verify the paths independently.

For compliance teams, cross-chain indirect exposure allows you to have more comprehensive visibility into the risk of your customer base, keeping pace with evolving typologies of illicit actors in the ecosystem.

Let’s take a look at how tracing with cross-chain indirect exposure works.

After plotting the Ethereum address in the graph below, users can easily see its exposure to a sanctioned address on Binance Smart Chain through a cross-chain swap, and then one-click plot the path.

To demonstrate the power of cross-chain indirect exposure detection, we created the following graph using the same simple process. By plotting the Bitcoin address on the far left, you can see and trace its indirect sanctions exposure. With one click, TRM automatically plots all 34 hops—crossing two bridges!

An additional critical feature of TRM’s pathfinding is its time-ordered approach. Each transfer is chronologically valid, ensuring that no funds are ever shown as being sent before they were received. This time-ordering is vital for creating an accurate and defensible account of fund flows.

All customers using TRM Forensics, TRM Transaction Monitoring, and TRM Wallet Screening get automatic cross-chain indirect exposure, effective immediately.

Access actionable intelligence faster with advanced search

We launched a new search experience, improving how you search our extensive database of enriched blockchain data to quickly find the best starting point for your investigations.

With this upgrade, you can access more comprehensive results and seamlessly perform key actions in TRM Forensics' Graph Visualizer and Block Explorer from a unified interface. The new search experience offers more than just traditional auto-suggestions, giving you a broader range of options to explore and maximize the value of TRM’s blockchain intelligence.

Here’s what one user had to say: “Love the new feature! It makes our lives easier because we don’t have to check on Etherscan or DeBank for the activities on [the] blockchain. And you know everything which makes our lives easier is great for us.”

Track Ethereum asset balances with precision

Adding to our existing Bitcoin capabilities, we now offer a running asset balance view for Ethereum within Forensics. See the wallet balance by asset type at the time of each transaction, providing clearer insights into the timing and flow of funds on-chain. For criminal investigators, this allows for more detailed transaction histories so you can trace the flow of funds accurately. And for compliance teams, this level of visibility is useful for source of wealth verifications and more accurate suspicious activity reports (SAR).

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Our continuous product improvements are designed to provide our customers with the best possible blockchain intelligence. For more information about how these innovations can benefit your organization—or to schedule a demo—contact us.

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