Why crypto sanctions screening matters
Sanctions authorities now list crypto wallet addresses directly. A single missed match — a transfer to or from a sanctioned address — is a reportable failure for a supervised CASP. Manual OFAC checks in a spreadsheet are slow, error-prone and hard to defend when a supervisor asks how a specific transfer was cleared. Automated screening against the primary lists, with a kept record, turns that from a liability into a routine step.
OFAC SDN crypto-address checks
The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) publishes crypto addresses on its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. Ichnos screens each wallet you submit against those listed addresses and flags a direct hit immediately — the clearest, highest-certainty result a check can return.
EU consolidated list wallet screening
The EU consolidated list of persons, groups and entities subject to financial sanctions is the reference list for EU-supervised firms, and it too includes crypto addresses. Screening against the EU list alongside OFAC gives an EU CASP coverage of the sources its own regulator will expect it to have used — which is central to MiCA and Travel Rule compliance.
Illicit-cluster proximity (N-hop exposure)
A wallet does not have to be listed to be risky. Ichnos assesses how many hops a wallet sits from a listed or known-illicit address, so indirect exposure to sanctioned or high-risk sources is visible rather than hidden. You see the distance and the path, not just a pass or fail.
Honest certainty tiers, not black-box scores
Every result carries a certainty tier and the reason it scored, so you can tell a strong, defensible match from a weak one — and explain it to a supervisor. There is no opaque number you cannot account for. Counterparty entities are screened against PEP and sanctions data in the same pass, powered by our own screening engine. For exactly how the tiers and proximity figures are produced — and an honest account of their current limits — see our screening methodology & limits.
One check, one record. Each screening produces a signed, timestamped report naming the OFAC and EU lists it ran against, every match and its tier, and the exposure findings — ready for your compliance file or an external audit.
Built for firms priced out of the enterprise tools
You do not need a six-figure contract to screen against official sanctions lists. Ichnos is self-serve, per-check credits, with EU data residency — the affordable alternative for small CASPs, EMIs with crypto flows, and the consultancies that serve them.