Elliptic, a UK firm that provides blockchain analysis tools for law enforcement, has released an analysis of the global market for money laundering through Bitcoin. Based on available blockchain forensic data, their analysis found that only a tiny percentage of transactions to exchanges were from illicit sources:
According to our study, the total percentage of identified “dirty bitcoins” going into conversion services was relatively small. Only 0.61 percent of the money entering conversion services during the four years analyzed were verifiably from illicit sources, with the highest proportion (1.07 percent) seen in 2013.
Further, those transactions that were illicit tended to appear disproportionately in Europe:
Roughly a quarter of all incoming transactions went into Europe in 2015 and 2016, but 38 percent and 57 percent of all illicit transactions, respectively, went to European services during those years. Thus, Europe hosted a disproportionate amount of illicit activity.
One of the report’s recommendations for governments and cryptocurrency businesses to address this issue is through strengthening European AML practices and expanding them to include coin-to-coin exchanges, emulating the 2013 FinCEN guidance that applies in the United States. Read the full report here.