Funds had gone, and the paper trail stopped at a wallet address. The counterparty was confident that moving value into cryptocurrency and through a chain of exchanges had made it untraceable. It had not. We reconstructed the route — lawfully, from public on-chain data and open records — to the point where recovery counsel could act.
Our client's counsel had followed a disputed sum as far as it could be followed through the banking system, and there the trail ended. The money had been converted into cryptocurrency, and the counterparty had let it be understood that this was the end of the matter — that value held in crypto and moved through several exchanges could not be followed. The client did not accept that, and neither did we. Our instruction was to establish, as far as lawful sources allowed, where the value had gone and whether any of it had surfaced in a form the court could reach.
Public blockchains are, by design, a permanent and open ledger. The starting wallet address was known; from it, the flow of value could be followed transaction by transaction across the chain. The counterparty had done what people who believe crypto is anonymous typically do — moved funds through intermediary wallets and several exchange deposits in an attempt to break the line. That layering slows a trace; it does not defeat one. Working only from data anyone can inspect, we mapped the sequence of transfers, identified the points where value entered and left regulated exchanges, and corroborated the endpoints against open-source records — the counterparty's own public footprint, corporate filings, and the operating jurisdictions of the services used. Where a service had itself been the subject of enforcement action or public reporting, that context sharpened the picture further. Every finding was sourced precisely and set out so that instructing solicitors could rely on it. We accessed no private account, bought no data, and used no method that would be inadmissible.
The client's legal team had an evidenced map of the rail: where the value had moved, which regulated intermediaries it had passed through, and the realistic points of contact for a disclosure application or a request to a compliant exchange. What the counterparty had presented as a dead end was, in fact, a documented route. The belief that cryptocurrency ends an asset trace is a common one — and, for a competent trace working from the open ledger, usually a mistaken one.
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