Defending the Chain: Financial Crime in a Tokenized System

Blockchain has created a new attack surface - from bridge exploits and mixer obfuscation to cross-chain layering that outpaces the tools regulators were given to fight it. As institutional capital flows onto on-chain infrastructure, the stakes of getting AML, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring wrong have risen sharply.

This session brings together compliance leads, blockchain analytics practitioners, and regulators for an unfiltered conversation about what financial crime looks like in a tokenized system, what the current toolset can and cannot catch, and where the industry needs to move before the next major exploit exposes the gap.

Participants will examine the specific failure modes: how privacy-enhancing technologies complicate sanctions screening, why cross-chain bridges remain the highest-risk chokepoint in institutional flows, and what travel rule compliance actually looks like when assets move between permissioned and public infrastructure. The discussion will also touch on how intelligence is shared - or not - across institutional networks, and what it takes to make that collaboration work at scale.

The roundtable will also confront a harder structural question - whether the AML frameworks inherited from fiat finance are architecturally capable of governing a system where settlement is atomic, pseudonymous, and borderless by design, and what a purpose-built compliance regime for tokenized markets would need to look like.