Crypto-Financial Mapping for Critical Infrastructure and Austere Environments

Complex systems like those in biology, ecology, and finance are ever evolving and difficult to represent. Emergent agents and properties can lead to rapid paradigm shifts within entire ecosystems. Changes and vulnerabilities that may seem small or are not apparent can emerge at the level of the system as a whole. Blockchain technology, and cryptocurrency more specifically, are evolving at a faster pace and affecting markets at a rate never seen before. This makes it difficult to use traditional approaches to financial system analysis. This Statement of Work proposes to research and, ultimately, map all of the crypto-finance ecosystem for critical infrastructure analysis and use of cryptocurrency in austere environments using a combination of OSINT, blockchain forensics, and natural language processing techniques. In the first use case, the final deliverable will be a mapping tool for crypto market risk analysis and stress testing. In the second use case, the final deliverable will be a collection of blockchain traceability tools and on-/off-ramp cryptocurrency service maps, which will allow end-users to identify where and how to best leverage cryptocurrency to make payments, as well as interdict similar uses of digital assets in austere environments by hostile actors. The first task will be to research and identify all the entities of the crypto-financial infrastructure globally. We will use deep learning technologies, such as multi-language BERT models, for named entity recognition, message classification, and topic modeling. Off-the shelf BERT models and other state of the art technologies will ensure the flexibility and repeatability of our experiments, making it possible to adjust models to other domains and publish peer-reviewed articles with experiment results. Our second task will focus on collecting and mapping relevant market metrics to the abstractions in the mediation layer that will later harmonize data across a wider range of financial markets and interactions. We will take an iterative approach to attaching signals and metrics to entities to ensure we produce relevant data to our end-users. To enable iterative collaboration on entity and signal abstractions, our third task will be to make visualization and analysis tools available to end-users who work on mediation and semantic layers of the mapping effort. This will ensure that we continue to provide valuable data streams to end-users based on their use cases. Our main research goal is to discover key participants and provide reliable data sets that describe their interactions with each other and the outside world. Ultimately, advances in our understanding of the cryptocurrency space will lead to an ability to protect our financial system, detect and mitigate hostile threats, and build a safer operating environment for US personnel.