Arkham Intelligence

Arkham Intelligence, commonly known as Arkham, is an American company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform as well as a public data application that enables users to analyze blockchain and cryptocurrency activity.

Founded by Miguel Morel in 2020, Arkham's platform utilizes AI to identify and catalog the owners of blockchain addresses. Its headquarters are based in the Dominican Republic.

History

Morel founded Arkham in 2020 and received investments from angel investors including Tim Draper, Joe Lonsdale of Palantir Technologies, and Sam Altman of OpenAI and Worldcoin.

In July 2022, during the midst of Celsius Network’s bankruptcy, Arkham found that Celsius owed over $500 million worth of digital assets to three of the biggest DeFi lenders, including Aave Protocol; it was also reported that Celsius worked with a previously unidentified fund manager to purchase NFTs and make deposits on yield-bearing decentralized exchanges.

Arkham reported on a hacker who stole approximately $477 million worth of tokens from FTX and sent 180,000 Ethereum (ETH) coins to at least a dozen digital wallets in November 2022. Arkham analysts noted that the hacker followed two patterns: operating between 08:00 and 10:00 UTC and creating new accounts for each operation.

In December 2022, Arkham tracked over $1 million of transferred funds tied to former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried as well as $1.7 million worth of cryptocurrencies liquidated within a 24-hour time span. This data was used by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, who filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried for his role in FTX's collapse.

Arkham provided data in January 2023 that identified “an alleged nexus of money laundering” from Bitzlato through intermediate wallets of Binance. Over the course of several years, it was found that the intermediary wallet deposited $15 million worth of crypto onto Binance's platform. That same month, Arkham released a report which revealed that Alameda liquidators lost $72,000 worth of crypto while trying to recover funds as part of FTX's bankruptcy.

The ARKM token was launched in July 2023 as the native token of the Arkham Intel Exchange. Originally released on Binance Launchpad, ARKM launched at a price of $0.05 and reached a price of $3.98 in March 2024. As of July 2024, the market capitalization for the ARKM token is US$326 million.

In June 2024, Arkham offered a $150,000 bounty on its Intel Exchange, which was solved and paid out, to anyone who discovered who was behind the DJT crypto asset. During an X Spaces event earlier that month, Martin Shkreli claimed that he and Barron Trump were behind the Trump-branded cryptocurrency.

In July 2024, Arkham tracked the German Government's movements of Bitcoin to centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Bitstamp as it completely sold off its nearly 50,000 BTC holdings worth more than $2 billion at the time. German authorities had seized the Bitcoin from the operators of Movie2k.to and transferred it to a crypto wallet Arkham identified as being owned by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office.

Arkham tagged the cryptocurrency wallets of Mt. Gox, the defunct cryptocurrency exchange, which as of July 2024 held nearly 140,000 bitcoin. Arkham users were then able to track the onchain movements of those holdings, worth billions of dollars, as the trustee began making repayments to creditors.

Other notable blockchain identifications include Robinhood Markets and Justin Sun.

References

{{reflist

Cryptography
Cryptocurrency projects
Information technology companies of the United States
English-language websites