Crypto security is entering an AI arms race as automated agents create more financial activity than compliance teams can handle, says Elliptic CEO Simone Maini.
The challenge isn’t just bigger hacks — it’s the sheer scale and speed of onchain transactions driven by AI. As “agentic commerce” — autonomous systems executing payments, trades and tokenized asset activity — ramps up, monitoring needs are growing exponentially, Maini told CoinDesk. Today’s compliance model, which relies heavily on human analysts to investigate alerts, trace wallets and flag suspicious activity, simply can’t keep pace when transactions run at machine speed.
“There simply aren’t enough compliance analysts specializing in digital assets in the world to be able to keep up with these volumes,” Maini said.
Why this matters
- Growth areas such as stablecoins, tokenized assets and AI-driven payments are drawing more institutions onchain. As banks and asset managers deepen their exposure to digital assets, transaction volumes and regulatory scrutiny will rise — and monitoring systems must scale alongside them.
- Manual review drives high costs per alert and per investigation. Elliptic argues that automation can reverse that trend, lowering the marginal cost of compliance as volumes increase.
Funding and strategy
Elliptic recently raised $120 million in a financing round backed by investors including Nasdaq and Deutsche Bank. Maini said the capital will go toward building what she described as an “agentic” compliance system: AI-driven tools to automate transaction monitoring and investigations that currently swamp compliance teams.
“For us, what we’re essentially doing for our customers is inverting that cost curve in compliance,” Maini said. “As transaction volume is growing, cost per alert handling, cost per investigation is falling.”
An arms race
But the same AI advancements that help defenders also empower attackers. Maini warned that AI lowers the cost and increases the scale of phishing, scam campaigns and other frauds, enabling bad actors to execute exploits at volumes previously impossible.
“That dynamic is turning crypto security into an increasingly automated arms race,” she said.
How Elliptic responds
Elliptic is applying AI internally to gather blockchain intelligence, attribute wallets and detect suspicious patterns in real time — essentially using agents to hunt illicit activity across larger datasets faster than human teams could. Those models are intended to help compliance teams automate alert triage, speed investigations and keep pace with institutional activity moving onchain.
Progress amid high-profile breaches
Despite a spate of headline-grabbing hacks, Maini said the industry has made meaningful advances in monitoring and compliance over the past decade. Tools have matured as the ecosystem expanded into stablecoins, DeFi and tokenized assets.
“The Pandora’s box is open when it comes to the institutionalization of digital assets,” she said. “That much is clear.” The implication: institutional adoption will accelerate the need for automated, AI-driven compliance — and deepen the technology duel between defenders and attackers.
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