A pilot program initiated by the Bank of International Settlements and several European banks, Project Atlas, aims to provide comprehensive crypto transaction surveillance, allowing regulators and central banks access to data for international crypto asset monitoring.
In a collaboration between the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), Eurosystem, De Nederlandsche Bank, and the Deutsche Bundesbank, Project Atlas, a new pilot program, has been launched. This initiative is designed to offer surveillance capabilities over international crypto asset flows.
Project Atlas, operating as a proof-of-concept, seeks to amalgamate data from crypto exchanges with on-chain information. It will be accessible through a single analytics platform for use by regulators and central banks for monitoring purposes.
This project aims to create an infrastructure that collects both detailed and aggregated data, pertinent to central banks’ mandates, from various public and proprietary sources.
The BIS shared these details in an October report titled “Mapping the world of decentralized finance,” citing the need for reliable, tailored data in these rapidly evolving markets that present both risks and potential benefits.
Project Atlas involves running a Bitcoin node for on-chain data collection and scraping data from exchanges to link addresses to specific entities or individuals. It primarily focuses on modeling cross-border Bitcoin flows between exchanges based on their locations.
In essence, this system has the capacity to surveil individuals by combining on-chain data with exchange data. However, the BIS acknowledged that privacy-focused services like CoinJoin pose challenges to their surveillance capabilities.
In summary, Project Atlas is poised to provide central banks and regulators with a global overview of Bitcoin and crypto flows, including data on entities, transactions, magnitude, and concentration. Combining this with central bank-controlled CBDCs could provide governments with ultimate control over financial flows.