cryptocurrency is used.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) project, codenamed Atlas, began at the Dutch central bank more than five years ago, but its potential value has been underscored over the last 18 months by a series of chaotic collapses across the crypto industry.
Atlas created a «proof of concept» platform that sucks data from both publicly available «on-chain» crypto ledgers as well as harder to source «off-chain» data reported by only some exchanges and users.
That information then provides a rough picture of cryptocurrency activity, although as crypto wallets can be set up anonymously and without the owner specifying location, it is not necessarily precise.
«An initial analysis of data collected by the platform indicates that cross-border flows are substantial in economic terms and unevenly distributed across geographical regions,» the BIS said, albeit acknowledging the «uncertainty».
Regulators have become increasingly concerned that the decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies makes them a risk, especially after the collapse last year of widely-used stablecoin pair, Luna and TerraUSD and the FTX plaform.
The BIS' 'innovation hub' prototype produces «dashboards» that show information such as how many bitcoin are being converted into U.S. dollars at certain times in certain parts of the world.
They can also provide an insight into the