The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has developed a prototype Bitcoin blockchain monitoring system, which aims to provide authorities with a clearer picture of how, when and where BTC is being used.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) project, codenamed Atlas, began at the Dutch central bank more than five years ago, but its potential value has been highlighted over the past 18 months by a series of chaotic collapses in the crypto industry.
Atlas has created a “proof of concept” platform that collects data from both publicly available “on-chain” cryptographic ledgers and more sophisticated “off-chain” data sources that only some exchanges and users report.
This information then gives a rough picture of cryptocurrency activity, although since crypto wallets can be set up anonymously and without the owner revealing their location, it is not necessarily accurate.
“Initial analysis of data collected by the platform suggests that cross-border flows are economically significant and unevenly distributed across geographic regions,” BIS said, although it acknowledged “uncertainty.”
Regulators are increasingly concerned that the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies makes them risky, especially after the collapse last year of the widely used stablecoin pair Luna and TerraUSD and the exchange platform.
