Every few months, the crypto industry endures another headline it would rather forget: a bridge drained, a protocol exploited, a scam that emptied wallets before anyone could react. For most of the tools built to police digital assets, the story ends the same way - a report explaining what happened, written after the money was already gone. Merkle Science was built on a different premise. If you can model how bad actors behave, the theory goes, you can see the risk forming before the transaction settles.
Founded in Singapore in 2018 by Mriganka Pattnaik and Nirmal Ak, Merkle Science is a blockchain analytics and predictive risk company. Its customers - cryptocurrency exchanges, banks, government agencies and Web3 businesses - use it to detect, monitor and investigate the illicit use of crypto. The company's pitch is compact: static blacklists are a snapshot, and criminals are a movie. Instead of only checking wallets against lists that are outdated the moment they're published, Merkle Science profiles behavior over time.
AI-powered blockchain analytics: Compass for on-chain compliance monitoring, Tracker for cross-chain investigation of illicit activity.
- Merkle Science, on its two core products
Pattnaik came to the problem the hard way. Before founding the company, he led growth and business expansion across Southeast Asia and India for Luno, the London-based retail crypto exchange. That job put him inside the compliance function of a real exchange operating across multiple jurisdictions - and gave him a first-hand education in how thin the available tooling was. An IIT Guwahati biotechnology graduate who had earlier co-founded a healthcare app, he is an unlikely candidate to end up building financial-crime software. But that outsider-operator path is common among the strongest RegTech founders: they build the tool they wished they'd had.
Who actually uses it
Merkle Science sells into three broad buyers. First, crypto-native businesses - exchanges, custodians and Web3 companies - that need to satisfy anti-money-laundering (AML), know-your-customer (KYC) and counter-financing-of-terrorism (CFT) requirements without drowning their compliance teams in false positives. Second, traditional financial institutions cautiously stepping into digital assets and needing risk cover to say yes. Third, governments and law-enforcement agencies that need to trace stolen or laundered funds across chains. In 2024, a partnership with Carahsoft opened a formal channel into US public-sector agencies.
The two products
The platform splits the job in two. Compass handles the live, forward-looking work: real-time transaction monitoring built on behavioral rule engines that flag anomalous or risky on-chain activity - sanctions exposure, scams, structuring - without relying only on blacklists. Tracker handles the backward-looking forensic work: tracing illicit funds from hacks, scams and exploits across more than 10,000 assets and 200-plus bridges. Those bridges matter, because bridges are exactly the plumbing attackers use to move stolen crypto between blockchains. A tool that can only see one chain loses the trail; Tracker is built to follow it.
That clarity - prevention on one side, investigation on the other - is part of why compliance teams find the product legible. It maps to how the work is actually divided inside a bank or an exchange.
