Opinionated

‘Tis the Season of Ransomware Indictments, Feat. Chainalysis’ Gurvais Grigg

The U.S. must keep up with crypto technology to maintain global economic influence.

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ABOUT

This week, “Opinionated” hosts Ben Schiller, Anna Baydakova and Danny Nelson are talking to Gurvais Grigg, global public sector chief technology officer at Chainalysis, a blockchain investigative firm.

Grigg spent 23 years at the FBI, rising from a trainee to assistant director. But this April, he took a career turn and joined a private sector company, which is often helping law enforcement agencies investigate crypto-related crimes.

In his intro blog post, Grigg said crypto becomes a tool of global economic influence, and it’s important for the U.S. to keep up to speed with the technology, unless it wants rivals like China or Russia to outpace it. But do we think the U.S. is the world’s best possible crypto cop? Gurvais have some ideas to share about this.

2020 and 2021, indeed, became years of a ransomware pandemic, with cybercriminal groups hitting vast numbers of companies in the U.S. and Europe. In response, the U.S. government started a massive campaign against the hackers, or rather, against people and entities who helped those hackers cash out ransom crypto.

Two Russian crypto services have been sanctioned already, the over-the-counter (OTC) trading firm Suex and crypto trading bot Chatex, and another OTC founder, Denis Dubnikov, was arrested in Amsterdam last two weeks ago, allegedly for helping launder proceeds from the Ryuk ransomware attacks.

Chainalysis has been involved in some of these investigations, and Grigg said he expects there will be more indictments, sanctions and arrests. Also, there will probably be more ransomware attacks in the future. What is the role of companies like Chainlaysis in all that?

Listen to Anna, Ben and Danny to talk to Gurvais about all that, and more.

Gurvais Grigg’s Twitter handle is @gurvais

Mentioned in this episode:

This episode was produced, announced and edited by Michele Musso. Our theme song is by Elision.

HOSTS

Dan Ilett

Dan Ilett writes on tech, money and energy. He advises business on digital strategy and technology messaging for large deals. He is founder of Erbut - an advisory company - and Greenbang - a smart technology research company.

Anna Baydakova

Anna writes about blockchain projects and regulation with a special focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. She is especially excited about stories on privacy, cybercrime, sanctions policies and censorship resistance of decentralized technologies.
She graduated from the Saint Petersburg State University and the Higher School of Economics in Russia and got her Master's degree at Columbia Journalism School in New York City.
She joined CoinDesk after years of writing for various Russian media, including the leading political outlet Novaya Gazeta.
Anna owns BTC and an NFT of sentimental value.

Anna Baydakova
Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Danny Nelson
Benjamin Schiller

Benjamin Schiller is CoinDesk's managing editor for features and opinion. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at BREAKER Magazine and a staff writer at Fast Company. He holds some ETH, BTC and LINK.

Benjamin Schiller
Danny Bradbury

Danny Bradbury has been a professional writer since 1989, and has worked freelance since 1994. He covers technology for publications such as the Guardian.