Anti-Money Laundering
The body of law and controls requiring financial firms to detect, prevent, and report attempts to disguise the origin of criminal funds.
A compliance program typically has five components: a documented risk assessment, customer due diligence, ongoing transaction monitoring, reporting of suspicious activity to a national financial intelligence unit, and independent testing of the whole thing. Digital-asset firms add blockchain analytics, which score addresses and trace flows through mixers, bridges, and exchanges because the ledger is public and permanent. The related counter-terrorist-financing and proliferation-financing obligations usually travel with the same framework. Users encounter it as account verification, source-of-funds questions on large deposits, and occasionally frozen withdrawals pending review.
In practice
Public ledgers have allowed investigators to follow ransomware proceeds through multiple hops and identify the exchange accounts where they were cashed out, years after the transactions occurred.
The common misunderstanding
That digital assets are anonymous and therefore beyond anti-money-laundering reach, when most public blockchains are pseudonymous and permanently traceable, which is frequently more revealing than cash.