Chainalysis has been nominated for the 2026 World AI Awards in the Blockchain category, recognising its work in blockchain intelligence, cryptocurrency investigations, risk analysis and increasingly AI-powered fraud prevention.
The company sits in an unusual corner of the AI market. Chainalysis does not build foundation models or consumer chatbots. Its technology is designed to make blockchain activity understandable: tracing cryptocurrency transactions, connecting addresses with real-world entities, identifying suspicious behaviour and helping investigators, financial institutions and crypto businesses decide what deserves attention.
That problem is becoming harder. Crypto transactions can move across blockchains, bridges, exchanges and wallets at speed, while scammers and cybercriminals increasingly use automation and AI themselves.
The World AI Awards recognises organisations, individuals, products and technologies contributing to the development and practical application of artificial intelligence across industries.
For Chainalysis, AI is increasingly being layered onto more than a decade of blockchain data and investigative tooling.
Turning blockchain transactions into usable intelligence
Public blockchains contain enormous amounts of transaction data. Seeing the transactions is relatively straightforward. Understanding who may be behind them — and how thousands of addresses connect — is another matter.
Chainalysis builds blockchain intelligence designed to bridge that gap.
Its platform supports cryptocurrency investigations, transaction monitoring, compliance and risk analysis for organisations including law enforcement agencies, regulators, financial institutions and cryptocurrency companies.
Chainalysis reports that more than 1,500 organisations use its technology, including nine of the ten largest crypto exchanges. The company also says its data has supported the seizure, freezing or recovery of $34 billion in illicit funds.
Those are company-reported ecosystem figures rather than amounts recovered directly by Chainalysis itself. The distinction matters: investigators and other organisations use Chainalysis data, software and services as part of wider enforcement and recovery operations.
Machine learning searches for signals humans could miss
Machine learning plays a deliberately targeted role inside Chainalysis.
Rather than treating predictive output as unquestionable fact, the company says ML can scan large volumes of blockchain activity for patterns and surface information that analysts may otherwise struggle to find manually.
One example is Chainalysis Signals, which analyses activity associated with previously unidentified cryptocurrency addresses.
The system categorises addresses according to what their behaviour appears to indicate, helping investigators identify potential scams, mixers and other activity without requiring every address to have an established real-world attribution first.
Chainalysis reports that Signals has labelled more than one million addresses with suspected illicit activity and categorised more than 130 million unique addresses according to likely wallet applications.
The company also acknowledges an important limitation. Machine-learning predictions can be wrong. Chainalysis argues that automatically accepting an ML-generated relationship as ground truth could contaminate investigations, particularly if addresses are incorrectly grouped together.
That caution gives AI a supporting role rather than allowing a model to become the final authority.
Alterya moves AI from investigation to prevention
Chainalysis has also moved upstream — trying to stop fraud before cryptocurrency leaves a victim’s account.
The company acquired AI-powered fraud detection business Alterya in January 2025.
Alterya connects signals across cryptocurrency, traditional bank accounts, digital wallets, websites, social platforms and other sources to identify infrastructure associated with scammers. Its technology is designed to detect authorised push-payment fraud, where victims are manipulated into sending money themselves.
At the time of the acquisition, Chainalysis reported that Alterya was monitoring more than $8 billion in transactions per month and protecting approximately 100 million end users.
In February 2026, cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced that it would adopt Chainalysis Alterya to help identify known scam destinations before customers transfer funds.
That is a significant change in how blockchain analytics can be used. Traditional investigation begins after suspicious funds have moved. Fraud intelligence potentially gives platforms an opportunity to intervene before the transaction is completed.
Chainalysis gives investigators an AI agent
The next step is more ambitious.
In March 2026, Chainalysis introduced its first blockchain intelligence agents, designed to turn natural-language instructions into investigative and risk-analysis workflows.
Its first agent, Chain, can answer questions about addresses and entities, trace funds across blockchains, generate investigation graphs and dashboards, monitor activity and automate repeatable investigative processes.
Chainalysis says the technology draws on experience from billions of screened transactions and more than 10 million investigations.
There is a deliberate design choice here. Chain can reason dynamically, but Chainalysis says workflows created through the system can execute deterministically, producing the same output when given the same inputs. Runs also retain records of their inputs, data sources and actions so analysts can review what happened.
The technology is currently described by Chainalysis as a beta release, rather than a fully mature replacement for existing investigative workflows.
That distinction is important in blockchain intelligence, where an automated conclusion can have consequences for transactions, compliance decisions and criminal investigations.
Graham Cooke, President of the World AI Awards, said:
“Chainalysis’s nomination highlights an important side of artificial intelligence that often receives less attention: using AI to make extremely complex financial networks easier for people to investigate and understand.
“From blockchain analytics and machine learning to AI-powered fraud prevention and emerging investigative agents, Chainalysis is exploring how intelligent systems can help investigators, financial institutions and digital asset businesses identify risk and respond more quickly. We congratulate the Chainalysis team on its 2026 World AI Awards nomination in the Blockchain category and look forward to following the continued development of this work.”
Chainalysis joins organisations, entrepreneurs, researchers and technology developers being recognised through the 2026 World AI Awards.
The programme recognises organisations, individuals and technologies contributing to the development and application of artificial intelligence across industries.
Chainalysis’s nomination in the Blockchain category reflects a particularly practical intersection between the two technologies. Blockchains create vast, transparent transaction records, but those records can become difficult to interpret as funds move between wallets, services, assets and networks. AI and machine learning offer ways to process that volume faster — while human analysts still need reliable evidence behind the conclusions.
That balance may become more important as criminals adopt AI too.
Chainalysis estimated that cryptocurrency scammers stole $17 billion in 2025, while scams involving AI techniques such as deepfake impersonation and voice cloning were substantially more profitable than traditional scams.
The result is something of a technological race: automation is making fraud more scalable, while blockchain intelligence providers are using the same broader advances in AI to detect it.
Learn more about Chainalysis and its blockchain intelligence technology at chainalysis.com.
Discover the World AI Awards 2026, explore the nominees and learn more about the awards at worldawards.ai.
