Across the world, trust in centralised institutions has been eroding. Financial crises, data breaches, opaque decision-making and repeated failures of accountability have left citizens, businesses and even public authorities asking a simple question: who can we rely on, and how can we verify it?
Many of these failures share a common root. Where decisions are taken behind closed doors and without the right professional standards, errors go unnoticed, risks are misjudged and accountability fades. The growing interest in distributed ledger technology (DLT) & blockchain is, in large part, an answer to that question. These technologies were not adopted because they were fashionable, but because they offer something many centralised systems have struggled to provide: transparency and accountability.
The Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association (BIPA) was founded to help ensure this promise is fulfilled responsibly.
Our effort to have the Blockchain Analyst recognised as an occupation in the European ESCO classification, which any country can later adopt in its own framework, serves exactly this purpose. In doing so, BIPA’s mission also helps create new jobs dedicated to ensuring trust, transparency and accountability.
BIPA wants to empower such communities, so that practitioners from public authorities, financial institutions, the private sector, academia and civil society can collaborate as peers.
Shared decision-making builds trust, and trust is what makes cooperation across institutions and borders possible.
We have deliberately begun with one of the most difficult challenges in blockchain analytics and intelligence: the lack of standards and interoperability. Today, investigators and supervisors often reach different conclusions from the same on-chain data, depending on the tools and methods they use. Attribution data cannot easily be exchanged, findings are hard to compare, and evidence may be challenged because the methodology behind it cannot be independently verified. Fragmentation weakens cooperation precisely where it matters most: in cross-border cases.
This is why BIPA, together with ICI Bucharest and Complexity Science Hub, promotes the Open Blockchain Intelligence Standards (OBIS), a global, open and vendor-neutral initiative. Other public and private sector organisations are invited to promote OBIS as well and to contribute openly to its development.
OBIS specifications are developed transparently, by contributors, through an open process. A series of international roundtables brings together regulators, supervisors, law enforcement, financial intelligence units and researchers to agree on common foundations for investigations, regulatory reporting and open research data.
OBIS will be formally launched at the Blockchain Intelligence Forum in Bucharest on 22 April 2027. The report of the Forum will then be sent to more than 1,300 decision makers worldwide in central banks, financial supervisory authorities, financial intelligence units, tax authorities and law enforcement. BIPA took the same approach after the 2025 Forum, when its open call for international collaboration in blockchain intelligence reached regulators, supervisors and international organisations in 90 countries on six continents.
When methods and data formats are shared, a capability built in one country can be reused in another; training delivered to one authority speaks the same language as training delivered elsewhere; and institutions can cooperate without first reconciling incompatible approaches. Common standards also multiply the responsible use of DLT & blockchain itself, because trust in the analysis brings confidence in the technology.
When it is concentrated in the hands of a few, without accountability, it can be used to protect private interests rather than the public good. Those who hold it may come to cover for one another, shielding conduct that is at times illegal or immoral, and every such case erodes public trust.
Its methods can be examined, its conclusions can be challenged and those who produce it are held accountable.
We believe each person should be in the right place, at the right time and in the right context. BIPA will work to create such contexts and to bring the right professionals together, working side by side for the public good.
Trust cannot be decreed. It has to be built, verified and earned, and that work belongs to a whole community. The world needs more transparency, so that we can see clearly the problems at the core of our institutions and work together to find the right solutions. That is how we make the world a better place, one in which each of us can reach our greatest potential.
“I believe every person can reach their highest potential by putting passion into the career they have chosen.
Part of BIPA’s mission is to bring more passionate professionals into solving the world’s problems through transparency and professionalisation, and DLT and blockchain offer one way to act on that commitment.
We invite every professional and institution that shares this conviction to join us.”
Bogdan Vacusta
Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association (BIPA)
