Elliptic

Elliptic is a crypto compliance company. It is not the elliptic-curve maths that secures wallet keys. Founded in London in 2013, it sells blockchain analytics to banks, exchanges, payment firms and police. They use it to check wallets and payments for links to crime, trace stolen funds and meet anti-money-laundering rules. Its data covers more than 65 blockchains, Solana among them.

In May 2026, Elliptic said it had 700+ customers in 30 countries. It also said two-thirds of global crypto trading runs through exchanges that use it (source). Customers named on its website include Coinbase, Revolut, Circle USDC$0.9990.0% and HSBC. On Solana, it stands out for tracking how the network splits one wallet into several accounts. It now supplies that screening to the Solana Developer Platform.

What Elliptic does in crypto compliance and AML

Any institution that touches crypto has to answer the same questions. Where did these funds come from? Is this wallet tied to a sanctioned group, a darknet market or a scam? Where did stolen money go after it left the exchange? At crypto's transaction volumes, nobody can answer those by hand.

Elliptic's software does that work. It labels addresses with who controls them. It scores each wallet and payment for risk. Those scores feed into sign-up checks, payments and ongoing monitoring. When something goes wrong, its staff and tools follow the money across chains.

The data underneath it all is built continuously, independent of any one case. Elliptic itself splits blockchain forensics into two jobs: the analytics provider makes the attributions and groups addresses that share an owner, and the investigator works on top of that dataset.

Elliptic Lens, Investigator and Discovery: the core products

Elliptic Lens checks wallets and payments in real time. It scores each one from 0 to 10 for links to sanctions, terror funding, darknet markets and other risks. The check runs before or as the payment settles. Elliptic says customers can set rules across more than 70 risk types.

Elliptic Investigator traces funds across chains. One click starts a visual map that follows money through blockchains, bridges and swaps. Elliptic says it tracks more than 300 bridges and swap services. The output is meant to serve as evidence for compliance teams or police.

Elliptic Discovery handles due diligence on crypto businesses (VASPs). A bank onboarding an exchange or custodian can test the counterparty's own account of its controls against what its on-chain activity actually shows.

Ecosystem Monitoring charts where exposure to risk is concentrating across the market, aimed at compliance leadership rather than case work.

Elliptic AI tools: Copilot, Decode and Pulse

Elliptic has spent 2026 rebuilding its products around AI agents.

• Copilot sits inside compliance workflows and handles routine screening and alert work, so analysts spend less time on repetitive checks.
• Decode (announced September 17, 2026) answers plain-language questions such as "who does this address belong to, and what is it exposed to?" Each answer comes with the evidence and the query that produced it, plus "Thinking Steps" showing how it got there. It launched for government customers first, with access for financial institutions planned later in 2026.
• Pulse (September 24, 2026) is built for front-line police officers rather than specialist crypto units. An officer enters an address or transaction hash and gets a plain-language summary and a route to escalate the case, per Decrypt.

In September 2026 Elliptic also published the Elliptic Standard. It sets out eight rules for AI risk tools: good data, models you can explain, AI safety, no lock-in to one AI model, settings you can change, human oversight, resilience and staff training. Elliptic's reason: crypto payments started by AI agents rose 522% between May 31 and August 31, 2026.

On October 1 it followed with "Built for compliance". The paper lists nine questions to ask any vendor, Elliptic included. It claims 99.99% uptime over 2025-2026 and a tested backup if its main cloud region fails.

How Elliptic screens Solana wallets and token accounts

Solana spreads one user's holdings across several addresses by design. A wallet holding SOL, USDC and USDT shows up on-chain as a main account plus a separate token account for each token. Custodians often hand screening tools only the main address. That leaves the token transfers, which include most stablecoin activity, out of view.

Elliptic's Advanced Clustering (described in December 2025) links a main account with all its token accounts and treats them as one entity. Screen any address in the cluster and you get the risk picture for the whole wallet, so a sanctions hit on a USDC token account surfaces even when only the SOL address was supplied. The method also handles edge cases such as a token account changing owner.

Think of it as a bank recognising that a customer's current account and savings account belong to the same person, rather than vetting each as a stranger.

Elliptic and the Solana Developer Platform

On March 24, 2026, Elliptic was named the compliance partner for the Solana Developer Platform (SDP). SDP is the Solana Foundation's toolkit for companies building on Solana. Its target uses are tokenized bank deposits, stablecoin payments and real-world assets. We covered its wider launch, with Worldpay and Western Union as early users, in our SDP report.

Inside SDP, Elliptic checks the wallet before a payment goes out. It also checks funds as they come in. Rules cover sanctions, terror funding and other crime types, and each result gets a 0-10 score. The Foundation's Catherine Gu said it chose partners "that meet the standards institutions expect."

This matters for Solana because banks and payment companies need their compliance vendor to see stablecoin flows clearly before they move them on-chain. Clustering that understands token accounts, built into the Foundation's enterprise stack, removes one obstacle to that.

Elliptic investigations: Bybit, Xinbi and Bitget

Elliptic's public cases are the best proof that its data works. Three stand out.

• In February 2025 it attributed the $1.4 billion Bybit theft to North Korea.
• In September 2026 it worked with the US Secret Service to identify and freeze 52 wallets holding $52.8 million linked to Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram marketplace serving scam operations that Elliptic says has processed at least $24 billion. The funds were USDT, mostly on TRON.
• After attackers took more than $350 million from Bitget's hot wallets that same month, Elliptic said it had traced the funds to addresses tied to earlier North Korea-attributed hacks including Bybit, and had added the linked addresses to its screening data.

Earlier work includes exposing the Huione Guarantee marketplace in 2024, attributing the 2022 Harmony bridge hack to North Korea, and linking the 2023 Atomic Wallet hacks to the Lazarus Group.

Who Elliptic is for

Elliptic is built for banks, regulated firms and police. It is not for individual traders. It fits:

• Banks and payment companies launching stablecoin, tokenized-deposit or RWA products, especially on Solana through SDP, where the screening is already built in.
• Exchanges, custodians and fintechs that need wallet and transaction screening to meet AML, sanctions and Travel Rule obligations across many chains.
• Law enforcement and regulators, who are the first customers for Decode and the target users for Pulse.

The catch: this is enterprise software, sold through a sales team. Prices are not published. A small Solana team or DeFi app with few compliance duties may find a simpler screening API easier to adopt.

Is Elliptic legit? Risks and limitations

Yes. Elliptic has been in business since 2013. Banks including HSBC, J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank have invested in it, and US law enforcement uses its data in live cases. Its risks are those of any data vendor, not of a crypto protocol.

• No custody, no token. Elliptic never holds customer funds and has no on-chain programs or token. It is a privately held company funded by equity.
• Attribution can be wrong. Risk scores depend on Elliptic's labels. A missed attribution lets a bad wallet through. A wrong one can freeze a legitimate user's deposit. Customers set their own thresholds and still need human review.
• Solana coverage has gaps to probe. Elliptic's published Solana write-up covers SPL token accounts. It does not say how Token-2022 extensions are treated. Confidential transfers, now possible on Solana after the ZK ElGamal proof program went live, hide transfer amounts. Privacy layers such as Helius's Rings go further. Any analytics vendor sees less there, and buyers should ask how each case is handled.
• Vendor concentration. A compliance stack built on one provider's data and AI models inherits its outages and blind spots. Elliptic's own "Built for compliance" paper tells buyers to ask about failover and recovery times.
• Impersonation scams. Elliptic warns that scammers use its name, including Telegram bots, and states it does not recover stolen or lost crypto for individuals. Its only website is elliptic.co. Anyone offering "Elliptic crypto recovery" is not Elliptic.

Elliptic vs Chainalysis and TRM Labs

Elliptic's main rivals are Chainalysis and TRM Labs. Both also sell wallet screening, payment monitoring and fund tracing to exchanges, banks and governments. The three overlap heavily, and none publishes prices. The choice usually comes down to three things: which chains and tokens each covers well, how its risk scores fit your rules, and how easily it plugs into your systems.

For Solana-heavy businesses, Elliptic has two concrete points in its favour. It has documented how it handles Solana token accounts, and it is built into SDP. Before signing, run the same Solana test wallets through each vendor. The results depend on how each one groups addresses.

Elliptic funding, founders and team

Adam Joyce, Tom Robinson and James Smith co-founded Elliptic in London in 2013. Smith was the first CEO, and Robinson is now chief scientist. Simone Maini is CEO and Jackson Hull is CTO. Dror Avieli joined as chief customer officer in September 2026. The company also has offices in New York and Singapore.

Funding has come in several rounds:

• $60 million from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund in October 2021;
• a strategic investment from HSBC in September 2025;
• a $120 million Series D in May 2026, led by One Peak at a $670 million valuation, with Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank and the British Business Bank joining existing backers J.P. Morgan, AlbionVC and Evolution Equity Partners.

Elliptic said the Series D would fund enterprise on-chain analytics and AI-native compliance tools. In December 2025 it launched a rebuilt data and intelligence platform, citing 4.6x growth in crypto transaction volumes over two years. That platform included the chain-specific clustering it uses for Solana, SEI and Mantra.