Illicit Crypto Addresses Received $14 Billion in 2021; Tiny Transaction Volume Linked to Crime

Chainalysis’s recent survey says, “In 2021, the net value of cryptocurrency authorized by illicit addresses escalated a new all-time high of $14 billion.” Compared to 2021, this record high is nearly twice the $7.8 billion. It constitutes just 0.15% of the 2021 cryptocurrency transaction volume.

Funds Pushed to Illicit Marks Fall

Cryptocurrency-related crimes’ utility recorded in 2021 overflew to a new all-time high of $14 billion. This new high is almost double that was addressed by illicit in 2021, i.e., $7.8 billion.

As per Chainalysis data, “this increase in funds’ value relocated to illicit addresses is still much below the average growth of the crypto economy.” In line with a recent blog post anatomizing the crypto economy’s 2021 transaction volume of $15.8 trillion, the blockchain research firm – Chainalysis declared, “The increase in value of funds transferred to illicit addresses doesn’t necessarily indicate criminals influence the space. Instead, this growth hints at the width of crypto-economy expansion in the last 12 months.”

To sum up, the blog post denotes the 567% growth in crypto transaction volume. The analysis service links this growth to the increasing value of cryptocurrencies.

Chainalysis even proposes its opinion on the expanding gap between illicit activity volume and legitimate volume. It says, “With the expansion of legitimate cryptocurrency usage, the growth of criminal usage is out spaced, but illicit activity’s share of cryptocurrency transaction volume has never suffered a drop down.”

Crypto Crime Obstructs Adoption

To verify that the illicit activity’s share of cryptocurrency transaction volume is declining, Chainalysis attributes data showing crime-related data, which is a mere 0.15% of 2021 volumes. This percentage is much lower than the 0.62% recorded in 2020 and the 3.37% recorded in 2019.