Everyone knows Arkham Asylum as the fictional mental hospital in the Batman comics (and games) developed by D.C. Comics. Arkham was the name taken from H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional city of Arkham. In crypto, Arkham is an intelligence platform used to track on-chain activity and uncover Web3 identities.
What is Arkham?
Arkham is a blockchain intelligence platform providing information on the companies and individuals behind crypto market activity. Journalists, media, traders, institutions, students, and several key players use Arkham to unmask pseudonymous actors and see a complete view of their behaviour. The key features of Arkham include a searchable address/entity database, transaction filtering, a visualizer (network maps), a block explorer, custom dashboards, custom alerts, and an API.
6 Reasons to Use Arkham to Uncover Web3 Identities
Arkham helps users track individual investor wallets, follow the moves of institutions, access dormant crypto wallet activity, track scammers and hackers, analyze trends, and access intelligence reports.
1. Tracking Investors
Did you know that you can track the value of crypto of prominent individuals in the crypto community? Using Arkham, users can track the wallets of Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), Jed McCaleb (co-founder of Stellar), Justin Sun (founder of Tron), Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase), Mark Cuban (owner of Dallas Mavericks), Satoshi Nakamoto (creator/creators of Bitcoin), etc.
Instead of relying on traditional lists generated by Buzzfeed or going through multiple SEC filings, users can access on-chain activity and data of individuals, traders, and wallets.
Traders can follow when important insiders choose to buy or sell crypto, how much was sold or purchased, the different types of crypto held and how often were such sales or purchases made with the help of Arkham intelligence.
For example, several meme projects sent Vitalik Buterin billions of Dollars in meme tokens between 2020 and 2021 hoping to make investors believe that Vitalik supported and used those meme tokens. Around the same time, Vitalik donated these meme tokens to India’s COVID Relief Fund, all accessible on Arkham.
2. Tracking Institutions
Arkham has been successfully used to track the crypto held or recovered by institutions. For example, the liquidators of Alameda Research were able to recover 4083 Bitcoin worth $110 million held across multiple Web3 wallets. Alameda Research was a crypto trading firm founded in 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried that was mismanaged and went bankrupt (along with FTX).
In the past, Alameda Research controlled over $800 million in Bitcoin held across exchanges, cold wallets, and hot wallets. Users can continue to track how much has been recovered by the liquidators through on-chain activity with the help of Arkham.
In another funny instance, the liquidators of FTX managed to lose $74K in wrapped Bitcoin while trying to attempt to navigate DeFi. Instead of paying the debt and closing the position, the liquidators decided to withdraw all the collateral, resulting in the loss of 4 WBTC.
In another case related to the exchanges OKX and FTX, OKX sent approximately $60 million worth of assets to FTX so that FTX could pay back its creditors. OKX holds about $157 million in assets on behalf of the failed FTX exchange.
3. Dormant Crypto/Addresses
Users can track the number of dormant Bitcoin or other crypto tokens using Arkham. Dormant Bitcoin is Bitcoin tokens held by specific wallets that have not been moved, traded, or transferred for a specific time.
In the first half of 2023, just under 15 million Bitcoin did not move for the past 6 months, reaching an all-time high of dormant Bitcoin according to Glassnode. Using the past as a reference point, investors start to keep crypto dormant when they’re looking toward long-term gains (as opposed to short-term gains). Another point to note, users holding Bitcoin for more than 155 days are unlikely to spend those dormant coins.
In another case, a Bitcoin wallet dormant for more than 10 years cashed out $9.6 million making a nifty %120,000,000 profit.
4. Tracking Hackers and Scammers
Arkham is used to track what hackers and scammers are up to, the transfers they make, and the wallets they hold. For example, Arkham was used to track the $90 million returned by the Euler hacker after the lending protocol lost over $200 million earlier in the year through a flash loan exploit.
Euler and the hacker engaged in negotiations through on-chain messages. Initially, Euler put a $1 million bounty for anyone that could identify the hacker followed by an ultimatum to the hacker to return 90% of the stolen funds.
In another case of address poisoning and a phishing attack, a scammer managed to scam over 630 wallets and $1.3 million in ARB tokens. Address poisoning is a scam where a scammer attempts to poison the address list of a user’s wallet by sending arbitrary transactions. These arbitrary transactions are sent from an address that already resembles addresses a user has previously interacted with.
5. Analyzing Trends
Investors and users can analyze important Web3 trends among cryptocurrencies, dApps, and traders using Arkham.
Several traders and whales dumped MULTI tokens from Multichain after delays in processing transactions on the bridge. The delay in transactions was caused by issues with a planned upgrade of the bridge. The delay in transactions also led to FUD including rumors of the arrest of the Multichain team in China, which caused a +27% drop in the token’s price. The Multichain team also stated they were unable to contact their CEO during this time to obtain access for maintenance.
In a sandwich attack, a user swapped $10000 in XMON for less than $3.99 after using a custom contract without setting any slippage protection.
6. Hacks and Incidents Reports
Regular, comprehensive, and extensive reports on Web3 hacks and incidents can help investors and Web3 users stay updated with the latest security threats in the decentralized web. Arkham has published detailed reports on Celsius and ICP and an analysis of the Wintermute hack.
How to Access Arkham?
Arkham currently has over 100,000 platform users. Users can sign up and join the waitlist to access the Arkham platform. After a few days and up to a few weeks, you will get an access link to join Arkham and use the platform.
Enjoyed reading this? Don’t forget to check out these 11 AI dApps on BNB Chain and the several benefits of using artificial intelligence decentralized applications.
Follow us to stay updated on everything BNB Chain!
Website | Twitter | Twitter (Devs) | Telegram | Youtube | Gitcoin | Discord
Disclaimer: DappBay is an open platform for all developers building on BNB Chain to display their projects. Description and information on Dapps listed on DappBay are directly provided by the developers of the respective project. Projects featured on DappBay are not recommended, vetted or endorsed by BNB Chain Labs, BNB Foundation or any other affiliated entity. Do your own research - you are solely responsible for your investment decisions and your use of any project featured on DappBay is at your own risk. The material available in DappBay should not be construed as financial advice.