Boardroom Brief | Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin on Malta's MiCA Edge, AI-Driven Crime and Building Trust in Blockchain

Jonathan Levin is Co-Founder and CEO of Chainalysis, the blockchain data platform used by over 1,500 organisations in more than 70 countries to track illicit activity, manage risk and build trust in blockchains. He has testified before the U.S. Congress multiple times on national security and blockchain technology, and is a trusted advisor to governments and companies globally on the opportunities and risks of cryptocurrencies.

In this edition of The Boardroom Brief, ahead of Chainalysis Nodes coming to Malta for the first time, Jonathan discusses why Malta's eight years of MiCA supervisory experience give it an edge, how the crypto industry has evolved since he co-founded Chainalysis in 2014, and how AI is reshaping both the threat landscape and the tools used to defend against it.

1. What can attendees expect from the Chainalysis Nodes Malta event in October?

Chainalysis Nodes events are where the people building the crypto economy sit down with the people responsible for keeping it safe. In Malta, we are bringing together compliance leaders, investigators, regulators, and technologists from across Europe and the Mediterranean for a day of real conversations about what is actually happening on blockchains right now.

Attendees will hear directly from law enforcement agencies that have used blockchain data to disrupt criminal networks, from compliance teams at major exchanges managing risk under MiCA, and from our own experts who track illicit flows across chains every day. We will share our latest data on legitimate and illicit use of crypto, walk through live product demonstrations, and run hands-on training sessions.

But the most valuable part of any Nodes event is the room itself. The problems we are solving, which include and are not limited to, cross-border fraud, sanctions evasion, terrorist financing,  require the public and private sectors to work together. That only happens when people are in the same room, sharing what they are seeing and learning from each other. Malta is the right place to have that conversation, and we are excited to bring it here.

2. You are bringing Chainalysis Nodes to Malta for the first time. Why now? And does the country's status as an early adopter of digital asset regulation still give it an edge in the MiCA era?

Malta took crypto regulation seriously before most countries acknowledged the question. The Virtual Financial Assets Act in 2018 made Malta one of the first jurisdictions in the world to license and supervise crypto asset service providers. That was not just a signal. It created eight years of live supervisory experience that most EU regulators are only now starting to build.

That experience has been validated. ESMA's 2025 review of Malta's MiCA supervision recognised the MFSA's high specialised resources, strong collaboration with Malta's Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, and proactive staff training on digital asset issues, supported by the University of Malta's Centre for DLT. You cannot fast-track that kind of institutional depth. The government's €100 million investment in blockchain, AI, and cybersecurity in the 2026 budget signals it intends to keep building on it. The industry has responded accordingly. Multiple major global exchanges chose Malta as their EU licensing base under MiCA, drawn by a regulator that already knew how to supervise them.

Malta is also looking ahead. The government is developing a dedicated regulatory framework for prediction markets, one of the first in Europe, applying the same instinct that produced the VFA Act in 2018: build tailored rules when new technology does not fit existing categories.

As for why now: MiCA's transitional period has ended, but the conversation is not settled. The European Commission is already reviewing whether the framework needs to expand to cover DeFi and crypto lending, and whether crypto supervision in Europe should centralise at the EU level. Those are conversations that require regulators and industry in the same room. Malta is where that has been happening for eight years, and there is no better place to shape what comes next.

3. You co-founded Chainalysis back in 2014. What’s the biggest way the industry has changed since then?

In 2014, almost nobody in traditional finance or government took crypto seriously. Bitcoin was the only blockchain that mattered, most people thought it was anonymous, and the idea that governments or banks would engage with it seriously seemed far-fetched.

The biggest change is that crypto went from being a fringe experiment to financial infrastructure. Stablecoins now move more value than many traditional payment networks. Major banks are building custody and tokenisation products. Governments are using blockchain analytics as a standard part of financial investigations. The U.S. Congress has passed stablecoin legislation. The EU has MiCA. These are things that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

But the other side of that growth is that the threat landscape has scaled with it. In 2014, crypto crime meant a few darknet markets. Today, we are tracking state-sponsored hacking groups, industrial-scale scam operations, and sanctions evasion networks that move billions. Our 2026 Crypto Crime Report documented $17 billion in scam losses alone. The stakes are completely different. What has not changed is the core insight that blockchains are transparent. Every transaction is recorded. That transparency is what makes this ecosystem both trackable and trustworthy, and it is what Chainalysis was built on.

4. You co-founded Chainalysis as a startup, and today the company serves over 70 countries. How has the experience of founding a company shaped your roll as CEO?

When you start a company, there are no departments. You are the department. In the early days of Chainalysis, I was writing policy briefs for regulators, making sales calls, reviewing engineering designs, and figuring out how to explain blockchain data to people who had never heard of it. That was not a strategy. It was survival.

But it turned out to be the best preparation for running the company today. I learned how each part of the business works by doing it. I know what it takes to close a deal with a government agency because I have done it. I know what it takes to build a data pipeline that processes every transaction on every blockchain in real time because I watched our engineers figure it out from scratch.

That experience gave me two things. First, judgment about tradeoffs. When you have built something from zero, you understand what matters and what can wait. Second, deep respect for how hard every function is. Building a company means putting together people who think very differently and pointing them at the same goal. Today Chainalysis has over 1,500 customers. I always tell our employees that today is day one. The CEO's job is the same now as it was then: make sure every team understands not just what they are building, but why it matters.

5. How does chainalysis use blockchain data to help clients spot and manage risk?

Blockchains record every transaction permanently and publicly. That is a fundamentally different starting point from traditional finance, where investigators often spend months requesting records from multiple institutions. On a blockchain, the data already exists. The challenge is making sense of it.

That is what Chainalysis does. We map the entire blockchain economy, billions of transactions across dozens of chains, and connect that activity to real-world entities. When a compliance team at an exchange screens a deposit, our tools tell them whether those funds have exposure to sanctioned entities, darknet markets, ransomware, or scam operations. When a law enforcement agency traces stolen funds, our platform shows them exactly where the money went, hop by hop, across chains.

We do this through a combination of clustering (grouping addresses controlled by the same entity) and attribution, where we identify who those entities are. On top of that, we run real-time transaction monitoring, risk scoring, and AI-powered fraud detection, powered by deep blockchain data. The result is that our clients can make decisions about risk with a level of visibility that simply does not exist in traditional financial systems. Over 1,500 organisations in more than 70 countries use our platform today.

6. With AI now part of the threat landscape, how is that impacting the way illicit crypto activity gets tracked?

AI has changed the math for criminals. Our data shows that AI-enabled scams are 4.5 times more profitable than traditional ones, and deepfaked impersonation of government officials grew 1,400 percent last year. The barrier to entry for sophisticated fraud has collapsed. Tools that used to require technical skill are now available off the shelf for almost nothing.

What AI does is remove the human bottleneck on crime. Operations that once required dozens of people now run autonomously. Scams that took weeks to build launch in hours. The scale is unprecedented.

But AI also changes the math for defenders. Blockchain data is structured, complete, and verifiable. Every transaction, ever, recorded permanently. That makes it ideal for AI-powered analysis. We are building AI agents that can trace fund flows, identify patterns across thousands of cases, and surface leads that no human team could process manually. Defenders need the same tools as attackers. We are making sure they get them.

7. Having testified before the U.S. Congress several times, what’s the one thing you wish more policymakers understood about cryptoassets?

That blockchains are the most transparent financial system ever built. The common assumption, that crypto is a tool for hiding money, is the opposite of how the technology actually works. Every transaction is recorded on a public ledger, permanently. You cannot alter it, delete it, or hide it. That is not true of cash, wire transfers, or shell company networks.

When I testify, I try to reframe the conversation. The question is not whether crypto creates risk. Every financial system creates risk. The question is whether you have the tools to see and manage that risk. With blockchain, the answer is yes, more so than in any other system. Federal courts have validated Chainalysis as meeting scientific evidentiary standards. Investigators have used it to disrupt ransomware gangs, seize billions in stolen funds, and dismantle terrorist financing networks.

The policy conversation should start from that fact. When regulators build frameworks that reflect how the technology actually works — transparent, traceable, auditable — they create environments where legitimate businesses can grow and criminals have nowhere to hide. Malta understood this early.