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Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs has appointed Ari Redbord, the former head of the U.S. Treasury and Financial Crimes (FinCEN), to help build risk-based anti-money laundering (AML) programs for cryptocurrency and digital assets.
Redbord joins TRM Labs as the company’s head of legal and government affairs. At the Treasury, he was senior advisor to the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. His resume also includes periods at FinCEN and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), in areas related to cryptocurrency.
Blockchain analytics is a hot space with the likes of Chainalysis bonding with law enforcement, Elliptic forensically following illicit money around the crypto ecosystem, and CipherTrace building “travel rules” solutions and monitoring cryptographic compliance regimes.
So does the hiring of Redbord mean that TRM Labs is positioning itself alongside government agencies to fight crime and law enforcement?
“I don’t think the focus will be on the long arm of the law alone,” Redbord said. “Actually, I think in some ways it’s just the opposite, because a company like TRM allows less regulation, frankly, allowing governments around the world to feel more comfortable recognizing suspicious activity and getting those out of the way. bad actors of this. “
The analytics firm’s data insights can be applied uniformly to three different segments, said Esteban Castaño, co-founder and CEO of TRM. Those are government organizations, including regulators and law enforcement agencies, cryptocurrency firms, and traditional financial institutions that may not directly hold cryptocurrencies, but are exposed to cryptocurrency risk, he said.
“Perhaps it goes against the traditional wisdom of startups to serve different types of customers, but we can provide insights into the risk of a single address and a single transaction or a cryptocurrency business as a whole,” Castaño said.
Founded in 2018, TRM is supported by PayPal, Initialized Capital, Blockchain Capital and Y Combinator.
