Service exposure

The identification and measurement of interactions between addresses under investigation and identifiable services, such as exchanges, payment processors, gambling platforms, mixers and DeFi protocols. Analytics tools may express exposure as the amount or proportion of funds an address or cluster has received from, or sent to, a service or service category (e.g., 40% of incoming funds attributed to exchanges, 5% to a sanctioned entity).

Exposure is direct when funds move between the address under investigation and the service without intermediaries, and indirect when one or more intermediate addresses are involved. Indirect exposure is usually discounted or capped by the number of hops, depending on the tool's methodology. Results also depend on the accuracy of the service labels used (see Attribution). Unlike taint, which estimates the proportion of funds attributed to an illicit source under a tracing method, service exposure measures interactions with identified services or categories, which may be legitimate or illicit (see Taint).

Direct exposure can provide a lead for obtaining records from regulated or otherwise cooperating services. Incoming transfers may help identify the service customer who received the funds, while outgoing transfers may identify the customer who initiated a withdrawal. Such links require corroboration: a service's deposit address may receive funds from third parties, and a service label alone does not establish the identity of the person controlling the originating address.