A unified architecture for sanctions intelligence in digital asset markets

Abstract

Sanctions compliance in digital asset markets raises challenges that differ materially from those encountered in traditional financial systems. Public blockchains introduce pseudonymity, indirect exposure, timing effects, and a rapidly evolving landscape of cross-chain movement and decentralised finance activity that complicate the use of entity-centric screening approaches. In practice, virtual asset service providers often address these challenges through fragmented tooling and bespoke logic that is difficult to govern, explain, or scale. This paper presents a unified architecture for sanctions intelligence in digital asset markets. The architecture integrates blockchain data, sanctions designations, analytical enrichment, and governance controls within a modular system design. Rather than proposing a new detection algorithm, the paper focuses on architectural principles that support consistent risk interpretation, explainable decisions, and regulatory defensibility across diverse blockchain environments. Sanctions intelligence is organised into distinct but integrated layers covering data ingestion, enrichment, risk propagation, decision orchestration, and auditability. A lightweight and interpretable risk propagation model is used to demonstrate how indirect exposure, temporal sensitivity, and designation severity can be operationalised without reliance on opaque techniques. The paper also addresses practical deployment considerations within virtual asset service providers, including alert handling, investigator transparency, and supervisory oversight. By offering an implementation-agnostic reference architecture grounded in operational realities, this work provides a foundation for practitioners, system designers, and regulators evaluating scalable and auditable approaches to sanctions compliance in digital asset markets. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks.com.business/.