Built for compliance arrives as crypto compliance rules tighten worldwide and a bank-led stablecoin enters the market

Elliptic, the global leader in on-chain risk management, today published Built for compliance, a paper setting out the nine engineering decisions that determine whether an on-chain risk system can support fast, accurate and defensible compliance decisions at agentic scale.

Machines are already moving money on their own, at machine speed. Compliance teams now have to make hundreds of thousands of decisions a day, at that same speed. However, many on-chain risk systems were never engineered to support that pace. A compliance system that computes exposure on a schedule delivers stale results. One that defines blockchain coverage loosely enough lets a screening miss exposure entirely. A system that skips testing disaster recovery, a spike or an outage, takes down the customer’s compliance system too.

That gap between machine speed and system design is exactly what regulators are now closing. As US regulators put together market-structure regulation, the GENIUS Act's stablecoin rules take hold, the UK's FCA crypto authorization gateway opens up, and Europe's MiCA is now fully in force, traditional financial institutions, payment providers and crypto businesses around the globe will be asked whether they use AI and whether they can explain, configure and defend every decision it makes. This comes as some of the world's largest banks and asset managers, including Goldman Sachs, Citi, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and UBS, announced a joint venture to issue a US dollar stablecoin, targeting launch in the first half of 2027.

Elliptic's new paper, Built for compliance, arms financial institutions, payment providers and crypto businesses with the nine engineering criteria they should require evidence of from every provider, so their own compliance decisions are fast, accurate and defensible at scale.

The nine engineering criteria, and how Elliptic solves for them, are:

1. Real-time computation: exposure is computed the moment you screen, never served from a stored result.
2. 99.99% uptime: delivered on Elliptic's API in 2025 and 2026.
3. Absorbing volume spikes: a customer's volume increased fivefold over two days; Elliptic absorbed it without incident and without warning.
4. Full blockchain coverage: 65 blockchains fully covered against four strict criteria, with sanctions monitored across every blockchain.
5. Cross-chain analysis: a single screening follows funds across blockchains, through more than 300 bridges, decentralized exchanges and coinswap services.
6. Sanctions screening beyond the list: addresses are connected to their controlling entity, catching addresses a regulator may not have published.
7. Configurable risk rules: more than 70 risk categories, set and changed by the customer, not the vendor.
8. Continuous monitoring: a full rescreen and new risk score whenever something changes.
9. Full disaster recovery: a tested, complete failover of Elliptic's primary cloud region with no loss of screening.

Jackson Hull, CTO at Elliptic, commented: “These nine criteria must be the foundation of every on-chain risk system. When compliance teams are evaluating a provider, they don't see these nine principles in a demo. They find out what they were on the day volume spikes, the provider's region fails, or a regulator asks about a decision made three years ago.”

We built every one of these criteria for enterprise-grade compliance. As on-chain finance scales and agents transact at machine speed, the systems that survive are the ones built for compliance from day one. Elliptic is one of them.

Tokenized financial services and stablecoin settlement are bringing money transfer volumes onto blockchains, autonomous agents are beginning to transact at machine speed, and illicit actors are already using AI across the criminal lifecycle.

Elliptic set out what those forces demand of an on-chain risk system in the Elliptic Standard, published in September 2026, which sets out eight principles for governing agentic on-chain risk. Built for compliance builds on that work, setting out the nine engineering criteria that put those principles into practice today.

The full paper Built for compliance is available at: https://www.elliptic.co/insights/built-for-compliance

About Elliptic

Elliptic is the global leader in on-chain risk management, powering real-time compliance at agentic speed. Built for compliance from day one, our platform delivers the most comprehensive blockchain data and intelligence in the industry, combining unrivaled coverage, accuracy, and uptime so that exacting organizations can manage risk, achieve compliance, and power their intelligence operations with confidence.

Founded in 2013, Elliptic is headquartered in London with offices in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. To learn more, visit www.elliptic.co and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

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