BIPA Chairman Joins ICA’s inCONVERSATIONS Podcast to Make the Case for Standards in Blockchain Intelligence
Bogdan Vacusta, Chair of the Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association, joins Wayne Haynes of the International Compliance Association to discuss what credible blockchain investigation requires — and why the profession now needs common standards.
The International Compliance Association (ICA) has released a new episode of its inCONVERSATIONS podcast — “On-chain, on-record: investigating blockchain for crime and compliance” — featuring Bogdan Vacusta, Chairman of the Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association (BIPA), in conversation with Wayne Haynes, Course Director for Financial Crime Prevention at the ICA and a former career detective with West Midlands Police.
The episode addresses one of the most persistent misconceptions in financial crime — that blockchain transactions are anonymous — and sets out what skilled investigation and effective due diligence look like in a rapidly evolving risk landscape. Across the conversation, the two examine how on-chain analysis exposes criminal activity and where blockchain intelligence strengthens due diligence.
The central message is one BIPA has been advancing since its inception: blockchain intelligence cannot remain a tool-led, vendor-specific practice. Different providers continue to produce different attributions and different risk scores for the same wallet and the same case. For the discipline to deliver judicially admissible evidence and to support supervisory decisions with confidence, it needs the same methodological discipline that AML, audit, and forensic accounting have long taken for granted.
BIPA’s position, set out by its Chairman in the episode, rests on four competency pillars that should define the profession: technical literacy, investigative discipline, financial-crime expertise, and ethical governance. These pillars also underpin BIPA’s working group submission of the Blockchain Analyst occupation to the European ESCO framework — a step toward establishing a common reference for skilled practitioners across the EU and improving hiring standards in the sector.
For compliance professionals — MLROs, financial intelligence units, supervisors, investigators, and due-diligence teams — the conversation offers a practical reference point for what credible blockchain investigation now requires, and where the profession is headed.
“Traceability is not the same as confirmed identity. The chain gives you flows; attribution gives those flows meaning. The data is public — the interpretation is not yet standardised. That is exactly the gap the standards work is trying to close.”
— Bogdan Vacusta, Chairman, BIPA
“On-chain, on-record: investigating blockchain for crime and compliance” is available now on the ICA’s inCONVERSATIONS podcast series at int-comp.org.
Notes to editors
About the ICA. The International Compliance Association is the leading professional body for the global regulatory and financial-crime compliance community. ICA’s qualifications, training, and membership services support compliance practitioners in more than 150 countries. int-comp.org.
About BIPA. The Blockchain Intelligence Professionals Association is an independent professional body advancing standards, ethics, and methodological clarity in blockchain intelligence — putting the discipline ahead of any single vendor’s product. blockchaintelligence.com.
The views expressed by Bogdan Vacusta in the ICA inCONVERSATIONS podcast are his personal and professional opinions.