Chainalysis, a prominent blockchain analytics company, yesterday issued an official article detailing the nature of their services to exchanges – emphasizing that they deal in transaction data, not user identification data.

Although not mentioning Coinbase and its recent bad press by name, the timing of the article strongly suggests its character as an unofficial response to Coinbase’s recent admission – that employed analytics firms had sold user data. This response mirrors another similar response from Elliptic, also associated with the admissions.

Chainalysis has been a known provider of services to Coinbase and Circlepay.

‘KYT’

Chainalysis have a term called Know-Your-Transaction, or KYT, used to describe their service practices to client exchanges. Within this regime, clients submit transaction data to Chainalysis to plug into their dataset. Very unequivocal on the subject of identities of clients’ users, Chainalysis wrote:

Any link from a transaction back to the person or people involved in that transaction must be made outside of Chainalysis because we do not collect any personally identifiable information from exchanges. Chainalysis only knows that a particular address belongs to a customer at that exchange, not who the customer is.

In short, while the firm’s analytics may help others connect the dots regarding user identification and data, any such connection occurs outside of Chainalysis’ walls. They are keen to emphasize in this regard that they “[provide] service-level identification, not individual-level identification.”

Unclear Statement

Chainalysis did not, however, make any mention of whether or not it has resold transaction data – anonymous or not – to other buyers down the line.

Inklings of this possibility came a few days ago, after Coinbase Head of Sales Christine Sandler said that their pre-Neutrino analytics providers had been “selling client data to outside sources.”

It was really important for us to migrate away from our current providers […] [They] were actually selling client data to outside sources, and it was compelling for us to […] get control over that, and have proprietary technology that we could leverage to keep the data safe and protect our clients.

Coinbase Head of Sales Christine Sandler

Based on Chainalysis’ response, it would still have been possible for the company to sell transaction data, not user data. But this point of distinction was not clarified.

The tenor of Chainalysis’ response was also notably different from that of competing analytics firm Elliptic – also forced to react in the wake of the Neutrino discoveries – taking a line less defensive and more business-as-usual than the latter.

For one thing, Elliptic couched their response more in the context of Coinbase’s recent bad press, mentioning the exchange by name. For another, Elliptic’s article was penned by the company’s CEO James Smith – offering the personal touch – whereas Chainalysis’ was written by the decidedly sterile “Chainalysis Team.”

And whereas Smith made extensive statements regarding the ethics of respecting users’ privacy – and abrogating that not for “marketing, business intelligence, or any other purpose,” but only to stop criminal activity – Chainalysis made less fulsome remarks.

CryptoGlobe reported today (5 Mar.) that Coinbase will fire the newly acquired employees who had previously worked at the benighted Hacking Team company.