Arkham is a blockchain intelligence company that has built a platform providing information about the real-world entities behind crypto market activity. The company is a Series A startup, having raised over $10 million from investors, including the founders of Palantir and OpenAI, as well as venture capitalists like Geoff Lewis of Bedrock and Tim Draper.
- Overview of Arkham Intelligence
- The Concept of Arkham's Blockchain Platform
- Transparency and Anonymity in Cryptocurrencies
- Arkham Intelligence Update
Overview of Arkham Intelligence
Arkham Intelligence offers a platform specializing in providing data on physical entities and organizations associated with specific addresses in the blockchain. This crypto-analytical system uses advanced methods of analysis and identity recognition processes to reveal information about the subjects behind blockchain transactions, including their behavior and activity. At its core, Arkham employs Ultra - its own algorithmic mechanism based on artificial intelligence, which allows you to collect information on a large scale. The platform helps to uncover key aspects influencing the digital asset market, allowing users to stay ahead of competitors by linking blockchain addresses to specific real entities and providing aggregated data and analysis of their activities.
The Concept of Arkham's Blockchain Platform
Criticism of cryptocurrencies often points to the inequality arising from the advantages of early participants in crypto projects. Rapid inclusion in a project can lead to significant token holdings at early stages when their value is still low. Insiders sometimes secretly accumulate tokens, reaping benefits. In some cases, externally unrelated addresses collude to influence management decisions.
The anonymity of addresses complicates understanding the sender and recipient of transactions. Despite the value of confidentiality in cryptography, there is an opinion on the need for transparency to ensure market fairness. The creators of Arkham Intelligence believe that the market functions better when the public knows about major transaction participants.
Arkham Intelligence offers a new platform for detailed analysis of blockchain addresses, allowing the verification of transactions, tracking the movement of funds, and investigating connections. The user interface allows sorting data by entities and tracking fund flows, unlike traditional token-based sorting.
In 2023, the company attracted $ 12 million investments with plans to get out of beta version. With these funds, Arkham intends to take the next steps:
- expand functionality;
- support more blockchains;
- create tools for traditional financial users.
Arkham's founder Miguel Morel notes the difficulty in identifying individuals behind transactions, despite the transparency of the blockchain. Arkham enables users to see connections between market participants in real-time.
Arkham's tools allow tracking fund movements, such as actions of large funds regarding tokens. Users can observe transactions and understand where funds are heading.
Arkham facilitates blockchain transaction analysis, making it more accessible compared to conventional blockchain explorers. Morel emphasizes that blockchain is not a "black box" and does not require special permissions for information access.
Even in its closed beta version, the project has already attracted the attention of the media, crypto exchanges, hedge funds, and other financial institutions. The company gained attention during the FTX crisis, publishing analyses on Twitter that helped understand unusual fund flows on the troubled exchange.
Transparency and Anonymity in Cryptocurrencies
Morel explained his motivation to create Arkham as an attempt to eliminate anonymity in the blockchain. Although some believe that his approach violates the principles of cryptography, Morel disagrees. He notes that there are two key ideas in the crypto industry:
| # | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1 | On transparency and decentralization of the blockchain |
| 2 | On confidentiality and anonymity of blockchain technologies |
He adds that Arkham was created to merge these two ideas. According to him, although all data about who participates in the network are publicly accessible and transparent, without understanding who is behind the address, this data is useless to the average user.
Morel also questions why the right to anonymity of a large investor should be more important than the right of a retail user to know what they are investing in. He points to a similar problem with opacity in traditional finance, where there are tools such as Form 13F in the US, requiring individuals or funds managing assets over $100 million and holding positions in listed companies to submit corresponding reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Arkham Intelligence Update
Users will soon be able to examine addresses on the Base blockchain, as well as their activities. Coinbase, known for its successful business and reputation as an effective gateway for new users into the crypto ecosystem, strengthens its collaboration with Arkham, confirming its commitment to serving as many users as possible in the crypto space, both existing and future.
The Arkham-Coinbase partnership follows a series of recent collaborations by Arkham with BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and Optimism. This will expand the coverage of Arkham's on-chain analytics platform beyond Ethereum, to include Base, alongside all the aforementioned blockchains.
Arkham's platform allows users to analyze labeled organizations, examine transaction-level data, fund flows, counterparty relationships, and use alerts for any definable on-chain activity. It achieves this through a data-enriched block explorer, entity pages, a visualizer, filtering, and a custom-built alerts feature.
