If there’s one theme that pops up over and over when talking to Tigran Gambaryan, who took over blockchain intelligence and investigations for top crypto exchange Binance last year after a decade of chasing crypto criminals for the Internal Revenue Service, it’s the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“I’m no longer busting through doors and arresting bad guys, but I’m still working to identify bad guys,” he told PYMNTS. “We’re still working with our partners in law enforcement and regulators. We do everything we can to keep cryptocurrency safe, not only for our customers, but the general public.”
Gambaryan has been involved in investigating many of the industry’s biggest crimes, from crypto’s first great exchange hack, which saw what’s now worth $17 billion in bitcoin stolen from Mt. Gox to the 2013 shuttering of the Silk Road darknet marketplace that first gave crypto and bitcoin a bad name. More recently, it’s been incidents like the Twitter hack that saw the accounts of famous people from Elon Musk to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden hacked to tout bitcoin scams.
See also: PYMNTS Crypto Crime Series: Mt. Gox, the Mother of All Crypto Heists
One thread that ran through all of his cases, he said, is that the investigations’ success “would not be possible if [the criminals] were not using cryptocurrency.”
With the use of cryptocurrency “I would not have been able to identify the perpetrators behind these thefts,” he said. “To me cryptocurrency has the transparency that the legacy financial system lacks. I would much rather investigate cryptocurrency than cash. And I think any investigator who’s actually ever worked cryptocurrency would say the same thing.”
Bitcoin’s Latest Gasp
With the cryptocurrency market imploding and bitcoin down 70% from its November all-time high of nearly $69,000, fear is in the air and panic is a threat. To Gambaryan, however, it’s nothing new.
“I guess I’m a little desensitized to it. I’ve been in the industry long enough that I’ve had more than my share of ‘crypto’s dead’ moments,” he said. “When the Silk Road was about to be taken down, everybody inside a law enforcement thought crypto’s going to die. You know, there’s no way, Silk Road is the only thing driving growth.”
From Gambaryan’s perspective, “Pandora’s Box has been opened. Crypto will go through its ups and downs, but crypto’s not going anywhere. The industry will grow, it will change.”
The people may also change, he added, but the technology is here to stay. And it’s only just getting started.
Gambaryan said crypto is still in the earliest stages of its development. The reason why the adoption has increased around the world, he said, is because there are more companies every day building legitimate companies that use blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies effectively.
“It is because of those efforts,” he said. “It’s because crypto’s not just used for Silk Road. It’s shown resiliency. Yes, there will be economic conditions that will affect it — like it affects every other asset.”
But there’s no going back, Gambaryan argues, pointing out that the dot-com crash didn’t stop the internet from existing.
“The technology itself is always going to be there,” he said “So, I think people just need to stop thinking of it in a certain way — start thinking of it as a technological advancement that’s here to stay. And it’s only going to improve.”
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