Foresight News reports that, according to the Financial Times, a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) studies cryptocurrency activity before and after the disbursement of World Bank assistance by analyzing Bitcoin on-chain transactions, wallet creation, and over-the-counter records. The study estimates the scale of aid funds being misappropriated and laundered through Bitcoin. The paper analyzes the crypto flows corresponding to 328 World Bank aid transactions totaling $238 billion disbursed to 93 countries between 2018 and 2024, estimating that the amount misappropriated is roughly 2 to 6 cents per aid dollar. The figure is slightly lower than an earlier World Bank paper from 2022 that estimated 7.5 cents per dollar using offshore banking data. However, the authors note that their estimate is based only on Bitcoin; stablecoins have increasingly become a laundering tool, so the actual scale may be higher.

Research findings show that in the month when the aid funds arrived, the volume of anonymous transactions via offshore exchanges surged by about 137%. By contrast, the growth in identity-verification transaction volume associated with all known owner wallets was only about one-third of the former. The number of newly created anonymous wallets also increased significantly, while the increase in newly created identity-verified wallets was extremely small, with almost no statistical significance. The surge in anonymous transaction volume was relatively short-lived and typically dissipated within one to two months. Transaction networks built around the five largest-scale aid disbursements indicate that once funds arrived, they flowed immediately to offshore exchanges and coin-mixing services. The degree of leakage varied across different aid domains: leakage of aid funds earmarked for transportation was particularly conspicuous, whereas no obvious on-chain anomalies were observed in aid for medical and health sectors.