Building the world’s leading cryptoasset compliance software – Elliptic

Custom software development for crypto risk management.

Graphic showing gears symbolizing the integration of blockchain, machine learning, and technology.

Tech Details

Blockchain
Node.js
TypeScript
React
Machine Learning
AWS
Scala

The Client

About Elliptic

How can we keep cryptoassets that areanonymous by nature safe from the risk of money laundering, dark market activities, and terrorism? Our client – Elliptic – answers this question. The global leader in crypto risk management offers a state-of-the-art suite of compliance >and investigative solutions explicitly built for cryptoassets. They serve financial institutions, banks, crypto enterprises, and regulators worldwide – Revolut, Coinbase, and Santander, to name a few.

Elliptic delivers blockchain analytics for cryptoasset compliance to help its customers manage risk across 500+ cryptoassets. Their solutions include:
– Screening crypto transactions for risk.
– Automating AML/CFT and sanctions checks.
– Exploring the risk profile of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs).
– Creating detailed network visualizations of wallets and the transactions between them.Elliptic also has the capability to analyze wallet data. For instance, if a user steals something from the cryptoexchange, Elliptic can track funds from wallet to wallet and later possibly notify the exchange about the fact that the funds paid from a given wallet come from theft.

The Challenge

Elliptic has entered a massive growth phase, having raised $60 million in October 2021. In addition, their product gained traction so quickly that they quickly reached their capacity to ingest blockchain data.. It was essential for the success of the product to match the market’s expectations, despite tight development schedules.

Elliptic faced a significant issue: the lack of software engineers in the job market who would bring in the right blockchain expertise. As a result, the company started to look for a long-term technology partner that would seamlessly merge with their in-house Engineering team and ease the burden on the HR department. This was when Elliptic reached out to 4soft.

the process

Working together

Elliptic’s software screens cryptoasset markets and blockchain networks to check for potential suspicious transactions that may indicate dark market activities, money laundering, or terrorism. 4soft’s team is responsible for uploading data from a diverse set of blockchains to Elliptic’s internal data platform. 4soft is responsible for data quality, and uses algorithms to verify data correctness and completeness.

We started this collaboration by extending Elliptic’s team with two software engineers. Within six months, the team grew to 14 specialists from different domains and continues to grow. Working in line with the Scrum methodology, 4soft developers implement solutions using a broad tech stack. For blockchain, our team uses Polkadot, Ripple, Algorand, Tezos, Near, Cardano, Dogecoin, Crypto.com, and Binance smart chain. Other implementations are in progress, such as Polygon, Stellar, Solana, Cosmos, Tron, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Litecoin, and the ordinary Binance.

The 4soft team mainly collects and unifies transaction data from various blockchains, also dealing with infrastructure for collecting this data in real-time. We also extract important data from these transactions – for instance, when monitoring transactions, we look for specific cash flows and other events that may indicate illegal activity.The application is built with Node.js and TypeScript, using libraries such as Mocha, Express, and Polly.js, and including practices like Test Driven Development. Our DevOps engineers work with Kubernetes, Terraform, and various Amazon Web Services, among others: Lambda, Athena, SQS, and Kinesis.

Our partnership with Elliptic goes beyond the implementation stage to include strategic consulting. Thanks to our 6+ years of experience with blockchain technologies, we provide Elliptic with know-how regarding both technology applications and crypto business cases. 4soft also benefits from Elliptic’s deep history in blockchain analytics. We regularly exchange knowledge, including face-to-face meetings in our client’s HQ in London and our Wroclaw office.

The results

What we achieved

Working in the team extension model, we help Ellipticmeet release deadlines without compromising quality. We cover the hiring process and provide new developers in weeks instead of months. As a result of our consulting collaboration, we transfer years of blockchain know-how to Elliptic, positively impacting the tech stack and architecture. As a direct result of our collaboration, Elliptic became the first company to offer comprehensive coverage of the Polkadot blockchain globally. We also supported the development of the world’s first XRP transaction monitoring system. In both cases, 4soft’s team was responsible for integrations with the blockchain networks.

Elliptic’s product portfolio is impressive. 4soft’s developers work across different teams, altogether contributing to Elliptic’s position as the world’s cryptoasset compliance leader.Elliptic’s products also serve a higher purpose because apart from financial institutions, they come in handy to law enforcement as well. The ability to track the transactions is being used in some cases by international authorities in order to eliminate and catch crimes hidden in the crypto-world.