Designed the first cross-blockchain tracing tool, reduced AML investigation duration by 75%

The old journey, across 4 seperate apps, needed to investigate a suspicious wallet

Identification of Opportunity

At Elliptic, a blockchain intelligence company, I worked on the groundbreaking "Holistic" initiative - enabling users to view fund movements across different blockchain networks, an industry first. However, this powerful new capability risked highlighting inefficiencies in the existing user experience, which required using up to 4 separate tools for certain investigations.

Definition of Problem

Elliptic's core user base included compliance teams, AML analysts, and investigators from enterprise organizations. Through research interviews and persona workshops, I found their key priorities were understanding timing of events and resolving cases as quickly as possible to minimize costs. The Holistic feature threatened to surface more complex cases that would be theoretically harder to investigate efficiently with the current toolset. Addressing this data requirement meant an extensive API refactor - a major undertaking.

An early information architecture artefact to refine the new data structure

Iteration to Solution

To provide clarity upfront, I conducted an information architecture project detailing exactly where additional data was needed throughout the user journey to optimize efficiency with Holistic's expanded capabilities. This guided refining the product experience to give users visual timelines and diagrams of when events occurred. With all contextual information in one place, users had what they needed to rapidly file reports.

A refined version of the information architecture diagram

The final version of the app, allowing a full investigation in a single product

Impact

The streamlined Holistic experience reduced the average time for transitioning alerts from "open" to "closed" by 75%. Its usability improvements also drove a 40% increase in government sector wins, as the tool enabled adoption by law enforcement not extensively trained in blockchain analysis. Overall, this initiative successfully democratized powerful cross-chain tracing abilities in a workflow-optimized package tailored to enterprise compliance use cases.