BIPA at the GCFFC Annual Summit 2026 in Vilnius
BIPA Chairman Bogdan Vacusta took part in the GCFFC Annual Summit 2026, held on 22–23 October at ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius. He spoke in the session that launched the Attribution Center of GCFFC’s Digital Asset Task Force.
The Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime brings together financial institutions, regulators, law enforcement and civil society to strengthen public-private cooperation against financial crime. This year’s programme opened with a welcome on behalf of the Lithuanian Ministry of Finance and a keynote by the President of the Financial Action Task Force on AI-enabled crime and emerging threats.
The Attribution Center session, moderated by Dimitrij Gede, Adviser to the GCFFC Executive Committee, brought Bogdan Vacusta together with Nevo Arama of Swissquote Bank Luxembourg and Eduardo Pecoraro of INTERPOL’s Operational Support and Analysis Directorate to discuss how to connect criminal activity to transfers of value across blockchains.
The gap between attribution and action
The session started from a simple observation: the wallet attribution that public authorities need is often produced outside the public sector, if it is produced at all.
Two cases made the point. In the first, a single unpaid researcher labelled around 22,000 wallet addresses, including a cash desk and two illicit vendors. That one act turned an untraceable flow into an actionable lead across several jurisdictions. In the second, wallets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were traced to a cash desk in a G7 country. Both attributions sit squarely within a public mandate. Neither was produced by a public authority.
The Attribution Center is designed to close that gap, with a focus on data collection and access:
• Blockchain analytics providers that join the initiative receive the attributed wallet data.
• Financial intelligence units in the jurisdictions where data is collected receive it directly.
• Regulators, law enforcement and industry partners receive insights on the challenges identified during attribution work.
• The Center builds capacity through training and the sharing of good practice.
Bogdan Vacusta brought the practitioner and standards perspective to the discussion. He underlined the case BIPA first set out at the RUSI workshop in Warsaw: attribution is only as useful as it is reproducible and comparable across tools. Shared standards, stated confidence levels and a clear separation between on-chain facts and analytical judgement are what allow attribution to stand up in investigations and in court.
Closing the attribution gap
Wallet attribution is the layer that turns blockchain data into usable intelligence, and in most jurisdictions it is missing. Analytics providers focus their labelling effort where paying demand is greatest, not where the public interest need is greatest. In many jurisdictions, up to 99% of entities remain untagged. Four consecutive FATF targeted updates, from 2022 to 2025, have flagged the same disparity.
The Attribution Center is GCFFC’s response. It is a project of the Digital Asset Task Force: a neutral, jointly governed utility that produces wallet attribution data for public authorities, participating analytics providers and the wider financial integrity ecosystem. Its main features are:
• Focus on underserved jurisdictions, with financial intelligence units in jurisdictions where attribution work is carried out receiving the data free of charge.
• Transparent method, with each attribution delivered with its source basis, a confidence level, evidentiary references and a timestamp.
• Independent oversight, through an Independent Review Board responsible for methodology and dispute resolution.
• A common attribution language, through a reference taxonomy anchored in the standards of FATF, the UN, the EU and other international bodies, so that the same wallet no longer carries a different label in every dataset.
Field work has already shown what the approach can do. Combining remote and in-person wallet collection, investigators exposed an unlicensed exchange operating as a laundering channel for more than USD 5 billion a year. The exchange was subsequently fined by the regulator and lost access to its infrastructure.
The emphasis on confidence levels, transparent methodology and a shared taxonomy echoes the case BIPA has made for open, vendor-neutral standards in blockchain intelligence.
A pilot for Romania
BIPA supports implementing the Attribution Center in Romania, through cooperation between GCFFC and ICI Bucharest, with BIPA acting as educational partner.
The case for Romania is clear. Across all categories, wallet labelling for Romanian entities is effectively absent from the major analytics tools. Some services handling transfers of value across blockchains have operated for years without being identified, despite direct links to illicit activity. The gap leaves Romanian authorities without the attribution layer that their counterparts in major financial centres take for granted.
A Romanian implementation would follow a staged approach: scoping illicit transfers of value across blockchains linked to Romania, estimating their scale, collecting wallet data online and on site, and producing empirical evidence with a final report and recommendations. Romania could then serve as the proof of concept for an EU-wide Attribution Center.
As educational partner, BIPA would help Romanian authorities and practitioners put the results to use. It would share good practice on attribution methods, confidence scoring and evidential standards through its training programmes for financial intelligence, law enforcement and supervisory staff.