# Chainalysis **Chainalysis** is the dominant blockchain-forensics company, founded in 2014, selling transaction-tracing and compliance software to exchanges, banks, and — centrally to its business model — government agencies including the [[FBI]], [[DEA]], IRS Criminal Investigation, and their foreign counterparts. Its core product clusters [[Bitcoin]] and other [[Blockchain]] addresses into probable real-world entities, converting a ledger that early users treated as anonymous into one of the most complete financial surveillance datasets in existence. The company's growth is the practical refutation of the strong [[Crypto-Anarchism]] thesis: the permanent public ledger that was supposed to make money untraceable turned out to make it permanently traceable once the endpoints were identified. Chainalysis attribution underpinned the major darknet market prosecutions, the recovery of the Silk Road-linked coins that now sit in the [[Strategic Bitcoin Reserve]], and the June 2025 tracing of a $31 million anonymous donation to [[Ross Ulbricht]] back to [[AlphaBay]]. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: founding and funding history, government contract exposure, the Reactor and KYT products, accuracy disputes raised by defense counsel, and the privacy-coin arms race.