Code of Conduct for BIPA Members

As professionals in blockchain analytics, intelligence, compliance, and investigations, BIPA members commit to upholding the highest standards of ethics, technical rigor, and public trust. This Code of Conduct (the “Code”) operationalizes both the Association’s charter and the principles of the Blockchain Intelligence Improvement Pledge, while aligning with global regulatory expectations as expressed through BIPA’s contributions to the Financial Stability Board.

Members pledge to abide by this Code in all their professional activities, research, consulting, tool development, reporting, and external representation.

1. Core Principles

1.Integrity, Honesty & Transparency

• Members shall represent their findings, methodologies, and limitations truthfully and clearly.
• They shall avoid misleading claims or overstatements.
• They shall disclose conflicts of interest or engagements that might bias their judgment.

2.Competence, Diligence & Continuous Learning

• Members should maintain technical, legal, domain, and analytical knowledge appropriate to their work.
• They should only undertake assignments for which they are (or can become) competent.
• They shall apply due diligence, rigorous validation, error checking, peer review, and reproducibility in their work.

3.Objectivity, Independence & Accountability

• Members should carry out analyses free of undue influence—commercial, political, or other external pressure.
• They must transparently document all assumptions, heuristic rules, parameters, thresholds, and uncertainties.
• They accept responsibility for their conclusions and should revise or retract them if new evidence so demands.

4.Confidentiality, Data Privacy & Protection

• Members shall respect laws, regulations, and contractual obligations regarding privacy and confidentiality.
• They shall safeguard sensitive or personally identifying data using encryption, anonymization, aggregation, or other privacy-preserving techniques where appropriate.
• They shall comply with applicable data protection regimes (e.g. GDPR, national law) and avoid extralegal data handling.

5.Legality & Lawful Assignment

• Members must comply with all relevant laws, regulations, sanctions, export controls, and judiciary orders in their jurisdictions.
• They should refuse assignments or tasks that are unlawful, unethical, or in conflict with fundamental rights.
• Where lawful and appropriate, they should cooperate with public authorities (e.g. law enforcement) within bounds of due process and human rights.

6.Transparency, Explainability & Verifiability

• Members should strive to produce results that are explainable and amenable to independent verification or audit.
• They should maintain clear documentation, version control, audit trails, logs, and reproducible methodologies.
• They should allow third parties (e.g. peer reviewers or regulators) to assess or replicate parts of their work, subject to confidentiality or security constraints.

7.Standardization, Interoperability & Data Sharing

• Members shall promote adoption of open standards, shared taxonomies, metadata formats, tagging protocols, and interoperability across tools and institutions.
• Where legally and contractually permissible, they should share de-identified intelligence, tag metadata, or indicators to support collective effectiveness against illicit behavior.

8.Respect, Professionalism & Fair Collaboration

• Members should treat peers, clients, stakeholders, and the public with courtesy, respect, and fairness.
• They should refrain from unjustified disparagement, defamatory claims, or ethically questionable marketing.
• They should avoid harassment, discrimination, or misconduct in any form.

9.Public Interest, Proportionality & Rights Awareness

• Members must recognize that blockchain intelligence implicates civil liberties (privacy, due process, free expression).
• Their work should be proportionate—analytics should be no more intrusive than necessary.
• Members should guard against misuse of attribution, avoid false-positive labeling of individuals, and resist pressure to engage in surveillance beyond ethical or legal bounds.
• If encountering requests or uses of analytics likely to harm rights or civil liberties, members should dissent, raise ethical objections, and if needed decline or exit such projects.

10.Peer Review, Benchmarking & Continuous Improvement

• Members should seek independent peer review, validation, benchmarking, red-teaming, adversarial testing, and external audit of their tools and results.
• They should share lessons, best practices, code reviews, and challenge assumptions to strengthen community trust and resilience.

11.Commitment to the Blockchain Intelligence Improvement Pledge

• Members explicitly commit to the Pledge’s key elements, including:

1. reliance on scientifically valid methods (not pseudoscience),
2. transparency in algorithmic or heuristic methods and confidence estimates,
3. enabling third-party verification of analytic outputs,
4. promoting interoperability, shared tagging, metadata exchange, and open standards,
5. cooperating with other providers, regulators, law enforcement, and academic institutions to raise legitimacy, trust, and effectiveness.

12.Alignment with Global Regulatory Norms & BIPA’s FSB Contributions

• BIPA has proposed, in submission to the Financial Stability Board (FSB), that global regulation of crypto-asset service providers and analytics operators adopt core principles such as “same activity, same risk, same regulation,” robust data disclosure, governance, risk management, cross-border cooperation, and transparency.
• Members should align their operations to those expectations: e.g. by supporting clear governance frameworks, enabling supervisory auditability, participating in cross-jurisdictional coordination, and supporting regulators’ access to relevant data (subject to legal safeguards).
• Members shall support and endorse regulatory frameworks consistent with the FSB’s High-Level Recommendations (e.g. governance, risk management, data reporting, disclosures)

2. Implementation, Oversight & Enforcement

1.Adoption & Commitment

• All members shall sign a written commitment to this Code (the “Member Pledge”).
• New members shall receive orientation/training on the Code, its rationale, and practical implications.

2.Ethics Committee / Oversight Body

• BIPA shall maintain an independent Ethics or Compliance Committee responsible for receiving reports, investigating potential violations, adjudicating disputes, and recommending sanctions.
• The Committee’s procedures (investigation, defense, appeal) should be transparent, fair, and protect confidentiality and due process.

3.Disclosure, Reporting & Whistleblower Protection

• Members must report known or suspected violations (their own or others’) to the Ethics Committee or designated officers.
• BIPA shall adopt protections so that good-faith whistleblowers are shielded from retaliation.

4.Sanctions & Remediation

• Sanctions may include warnings, temporary suspension, revocation of membership, public censure, or other corrective measures.
• In cases where violations are inadvertent or due to misunderstanding, members may be required to remediate, retrain, or correct the work.
• The severity of sanction should be proportionate to the gravity, context, and recurrence of the breach.

5.Periodic Review & Amendment

• This Code should be reviewed on a regular basis (e.g. biennially) to reflect evolving technology, jurisprudence, regulatory norms, and community feedback.
• Members should be invited to comment and contribute to updates.