Mastercard has agreed to buy the blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace to bolster security around crypto transactions.
The move will enable Mastercard to assist banks, crypto exchanges and other organizations to comply with anti-money-laundering regulations and protect against fraud as blockchain and crypto services expand within the card network’s ecosystem, the Purchase, New York-based card network said Thursday.
Arrests stemming from crypto scams are on the rise. CipherTrace uses data analytics and algorithms to analyze transactions across 7,000 cryptocurrency entities.
The Menlo Park, California-based firm, launched in 2015, collaborates with government agencies to bridge security gaps in the mostly unregulated cryptocurrency sphere. To date, CipherTrace has raised about $45 million in venture capital funding.
“We help companies—whether they are banks or cryptocurrency exchanges, government regulators or law enforcement to keep the crypto economy safe,” CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans said in a press release.
“With the rapid growth of the digital asset ecosystem comes the need to ensure it is trusted and safe,” Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s president of cyber and intelligence, said in the release.
Financial terms of the deal, which is set to close by the end of the year, were not disclosed.
