CipherOwl is now a member of IVAN, the Illicit Virtual Asset Notification public-private partnership.
IVAN brings together government agencies from the United States and allied nations with industry to share intelligence on illicit virtual asset activity, including ransomware payment flows. MITRE manages the partnership as a trusted third party, keeping it free of commercial conflicts of interest. That neutrality is what makes the model work. Vetted partners can alert one another to illicit activity while each keeps ownership of its own data.
Government participants include the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, IRS Criminal Investigation, Army Criminal Investigation Division, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the USPS Office of Inspector General, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency. On the industry side sit exchanges, stablecoin issuers, and blockchain intelligence firms.
For the institutions we serve, membership sharpens what CipherOwl does every day. Indicators of emerging threats reach us as they are shared across the partnership rather than after they surface in public reporting. Verified intelligence on illicit addresses and typologies informs the screening our customers run on every transaction. And when Strix traces a case, the cross-sector context on ransomware payment flows is already in hand.
Disrupting illicit finance in crypto is a whole-of-government and whole-of-industry effort. The people who lead our public-sector work, Matt O'Neill and Ray Shuler, spent their careers inside it at the U.S. Secret Service and Homeland Security Investigations. We are proud to be part of it.