About

I gather information from adversarial systems.

Today, my focus is blockchain investigation.

I trace illicit funds across mixers, bridges, DeFi and exchanges, identify the services used to move and launder them, and turn on-chain activity into evidence that investigators, compliance teams and legal professionals can act on.

My work has involved investigations alongside Swiss law enforcement, the US Secret Service, UK law enforcement, compliance teams, legal professionals and cryptoasset businesses.

Over time, my work moved from investigating transactions to understanding the systems behind investigations: how behaviour can be represented, how patterns can be formalised, and how investigative reasoning can be made reproducible.

Investigative systems

I design deterministic systems for structuring blockchain investigations, formalising investigative patterns and reducing repetitive analytical work.

My work in this area includes:

• ontology engineering
• graph-based investigation
• pattern classification
• deterministic tracing
• knowledge representation
• automated reporting

The question behind this work predates blockchain.

I trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where I also tutored semiotics and pedagogy, and graduated with highest honors with a thesis on semiotic relationships across systems.

Its question was simple: how can we infer the structure and behaviour of one system from what it leaves behind?

An investigation is that question under a deadline.

I continue exploring it in Constraints, my newsletter on what blockchains reveal and conceal, and through research projects and prototypes such as Container NFTs, Atomic Barter and Portable Sentinel. Each explores, in a different way, what can be proven, exchanged or observed between systems.

I am interested in what remains when a system is adversarial, incomplete or deliberately opaque. Blockchains happen to be a particularly good place to look because even when activity is deliberately obscured, the traces remain.

Outside blockchain, I write short stories and poetry in Italian, and I have created installations and other artistic work.