Agentic Crypto Payments Have Surged by 500%1 in the Last Three Months, Crypto Compliance Must Become Agentic Too

Elliptic has been at the intersection of financial crime and on-chain finance since 2013, long enough to recognize the shift to agentic transactions as a defining inflection point in financial crime risk, and to be the first to define what governing it demands.

On-chain finance is now running at agentic speed. Machines are originating, authorizing and settling transactions at a volume no human team can review. Illicit actors are using AI to evade detection at a speed and volume that manual processes cannot track. Models built around human review were never designed for this world. They are already overwhelmed.

Three forces are driving this shift. First, autonomous agents are increasingly the counterparty on both sides of a transaction, not just people initiating activity for software to review: research from PHD and WARC ² projects agent-facilitated consumer spending will reach $3.35 trillion by 2030. Second, illicit actors are exploiting that same speed and technology, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint ³ Center recorded $893.3 million in adjusted 2025 losses tied to an identified AI nexus. Third, on-chain finance is moving into the mainstream with stablecoin transaction volumes alone reaching $33 trillion ⁴ in 2025.

Blockchain analytics was built for a pre-agentic world. Much of the industry still runs on an investigation led and backward-looking model, unable to process a threat that arrives faster than a team can review it. That model cannot govern a system where the risk decision has to be made before a transaction settles, not after.

"We need a new approach to on-chain financial risk, built on an operating system that can execute at agentic speed," said Simone Maini, CEO of Elliptic. "A criminal only needs to be right once. Our customers need to be right every time, and that only holds if we stop bad actors at the door, not investigate them afterwards."

A decade of on-chain data remains valuable. What has to change is the redundant architecture built on top of it. Forensics-first frameworks which investigate crime after the fact don't catch risk before it becomes systemic. Real-time detection models built for speed, resilience and defensibility are what the industry needs instead.

The Elliptic Standard defines eight principles for what a defensible, regulator-credible agentic risk intelligence system has to do:

"An agent that can act fast but can not explain why it acted is not compliant, it is just automation," Maini said. "Every agentic system has to pass the principles in the Standard, starting with our own platform, which we hold to the very highest standards."

“The question regulators are going to ask is if you can explain what it did and why, not whether you are using AI. The Elliptic Standard gets that right. Human oversight has to be built into these systems from the start, not added when something goes wrong,” said Joanna Marathakis, VP Financial Crimes Compliance, Circle.

“Agentic AI has enormous potential, and it is exciting to see Elliptic putting responsible use at the center of the conversation. The Elliptic Standard’s focus on transparency, human oversight, and accountability is a welcome contribution as the industry explores what this technology can do,” saint Todd Mcelduff, Chief Compliance Officer, CoinFlip.

The Elliptic Standard was developed with input from regulated institutions who are collaborating with Elliptic to build AI-powered capabilities. Elliptic will hold itself to the same eight principles as it builds its own agentic on-chain risk solutions, and is asking every other provider, and every company evaluating one, to do the same.

“Agentic systems are already making decisions today," Maini said. "The industry does not get to wait for a good moment to build accountability in, it has to do it now."

The full text of the Elliptic Standard is available at: https://www.elliptic.co/the-standard-for-agentic-on-chain-risk

About Elliptic

Elliptic is the global leader in on-chain risk, powering real-time compliance at agentic speed. Built for compliance from day one, our platform delivers the most comprehensive blockchain data and intelligence in the industry, combining unrivaled coverage, accuracy, and uptime so that exacting organizations can manage risk, achieve compliance, and power their intelligence operations with confidence.

Founded in 2013, Elliptic is headquartered in London with offices in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. To learn more, visit www.elliptic.co and follow us on LinkedIn and X .

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¹ Based on observations between 31st May to August 31st, 2026, the Elliptic Intelligence team measured a 522% increase in crypto transaction count on agentic rails.

² PHD and WARC, "From abundance to agents," July 2026. https://www.phdmedia.com/new-phd-x-warc-research-from-abundance-to-agents-how-the-delegation-of-choice-is-transforming-marketing/

³ https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf

4 Artemis Analytics

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260910289941/en/

Contact

Media Contact

Rachel Matthews

Global Marketing and Communications Director, Elliptic

rachel.matthews@elliptic.co

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