BIPA at the Vienna Congress: A Call for Standards and Interoperability in Blockchain Intelligence
The Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association (BIPA) brought its case for global standards and interoperability to the Vienna Congress (vi3nna.com), with Chairman Bogdan Vacusta delivering a twenty-minute keynote on the work the Association has been advancing since its inception — and on the international project now being prepared for launch at the Blockchain Intelligence Forum 2027 in Bucharest.
The intervention positioned BIPA at the centre of an emerging international debate: how should public authorities, regulated institutions, and the profession itself approach blockchain analysis & intelligence in a world where the answers given by different tools, for the same case, are still not the same?
From a Practitioner’s Question to a Global Initiative
Bogdan opened by recounting the origin of the initiative. From late 2023 onwards, working in a supervisory environment, he began structured communications with every major blockchain analytics provider — seeking credible data on transaction volumes, dominant risks, and main players within a national jurisdiction, in order to understand the implications for financial stability.
What came back was contradictory information across providers — raising legitimate questions about the methodology, scope, and use of these tools by the institutions that rely on them. Five conclusions emerged from those interactions:
- No formal framework for ethics & governance across the blockchain analytics sector
- Training that was tool-led, focused on how to use a product rather than understanding the underlying problems
- Different tools producing different results, with no way to use any single one to develop independent in-house analytical capability
- The risk of strategic dependency on a single private provider for outputs that inform supervisory decisions
- An open opportunity to agree common standards — methodological, technical, and professional
This is the rationale that gave rise to BIPA as a global initiative addressed to professionals — regardless of which blockchain analytics company trained them.
The Blockchain Intelligence Forum 2025: a Public Conversation
In April 2025, BIPA together with ICI Bucharest — Romania’s National Institute for R&D in Informatics, the country’s leading ICT research institute, founded in 1970 and operating under the Government of Romania — hosted the first Blockchain Intelligence Forum at the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. More than 500 delegates from 35+ countries gathered to discuss these concerns openly.
The forum’s main conclusion was unambiguous: standards and interoperability are a must. Common themes recurred across keynotes and panels: moving blockchain tracing from heuristics to data science; opening up methodologies and moving away from “black-box” tools; agreeing common taxonomies and attribution standards across providers; and producing independently reproducible, judicially admissible outputs.
Recognising the Profession: the ESCO Proposal
The Vienna address also covered BIPA’s work on professional recognition. Building on a BIPA proposal, a working group has formally submitted the Blockchain Analyst occupation to the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) framework — defining the role around four competency pillars: technical literacy, investigative skills, financial-crime expertise, and ethical governance.
Official recognition under ESCO would raise the level of professionalism in the sector, improve hiring prospects for practitioners, and create a common reference for skilled blockchain intelligence professionals across the EU.
From Tool-User to Professional
A central theme of Bogdan’s address was the shift in perspective BIPA is asking the sector to make.
Today, blockchain intelligence too often rests on:
- Skills tied to one commercial platform
- No common methodology or taxonomy
- Different tools yielding different answers on the same case
- Results that cannot be reproduced or independently verified
- Legal justifications developed ex post
- Public authorities exposed to strategic dependency on a single vendor
BIPA’s approach proposes the opposite:
- Skills built around the problem, not the product
- A common ethical & governance framework
- A shared training curriculum, tool-agnostic at the base
- Reproducible methods, usable across teams and borders
- Solutions designed & built with judicial frameworks in mind
- Regulators and supervisors building independent analytical capability
Why the World Now Needs a Global Standards Project
The Vienna keynote made the case for going beyond a European response. MiCA has set foundational rules for crypto in Europe — but no global data standards or interoperability mechanisms. The IMF has warned that data fragmentation creates macroeconomic blind spots and enables hidden market manipulation. And the industry’s day-to-day reality remains one in which different methodologies, attributions, and risk scores are produced by each tool, for the same wallet and the same case.
A joint proposal from BIPA and ICI Bucharest has been submitted to the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) for the launch of a global standards and interoperability project for blockchain intelligence. The proposal is currently under consideration.
Open Blockchain Intelligence Standards (OBIS)
The vehicle for that work is OBIS — Open Blockchain Intelligence Standards — a multi-jurisdictional, multi-stakeholder framework structured around three pillars:
- Technical standardisation — harmonised data exchange schemas, interoperable APIs across tools, and unified terminologies and investigation documentation
- Legal & forensic reliability — chain-of-custody and provenance procedures, validation protocols comparable to recognised forensic disciplines, and evidentiary thresholds for admissibility
- Professional accreditation — an independent certification and training framework, continuous-knowledge requirements, and defined competency benchmarks
The work will be advanced through a series of institutional roundtables, with the global framework to be announced at the Blockchain Intelligence Forum 2027 in Bucharest, on 8 April 2027.
Looking Ahead
The Vienna Congress address closed with three takeaways:
- Blockchain intelligence is now critical to financial stability — and to the rule of law. It can no longer rest on opaque, tool-specific methodologies that produce different answers to the same question.
- BIPA is the first professional body putting ethics, common training, and methodological clarity ahead of any single vendor’s product.
- OBIS is the next step — and it has to be global. The framework launches in Bucharest on 8 April 2027.
BIPA continues to invite regulators, supervisors, law enforcement agencies, financial intelligence units, international standard-setters, industry, and academia to engage with the OBIS roundtables and the Forum.
For more about the Vi3nna Congress, visit https://vi3nna.com/
The views expressed by Bogdan Vacusta during the Vienna Congress address are his personal and professional opinions.