Real-Time Identification of Fraud-Linked Cryptocurrency Exchanges from Victim-Reported Suspect Wallet Addresses through Automated Blockchain Analytics
Ministry of Home Affairs · Blockchain & Cybersecurity · Software
Nearly the same problem as SIH26182 with a victim-report framing and harder real-time and mixer requirements — pick one of the two, not both, and if this one, make the laundering-pattern detection your distinctive contribution and be honest that mixers and bridges defeat the trace.
What it actually is
Fraud victims report the wallet addresses scammers used to collect money, but those are usually burner or intermediary wallets, and investigators cannot quickly tell which exchange they connect to — which delays freezing assets and recovering funds. The ask is a near-real-time system that traces a victim-reported wallet to the nearest exchange or VASP and generates investigative intelligence, integrated with the complaint portals.
What to build
A near-real-time crypto fraud attribution system that ingests victim-reported wallet addresses from cybercrime complaint systems, automatically traces the blockchain to identify the nearest exchange or VASP receiving direct deposits, detects fund-movement and layering patterns, clusters exchange wallets, flags intermediary laundering wallets and cross-chain movement through bridges, categorises wallet risk, and generates automated investigative recommendations and analytics dashboards, integrated with the SAHYOG and NCRP platforms so a reported wallet turns into actionable intelligence for faster asset freezing.
Smallest thing that wins the room
Ingest a victim-reported burner wallet, trace it in near real time through its layering hops to a labelled exchange deposit address, flag the intermediary laundering wallets along the way, and generate an investigative recommendation with a risk category for the reported wallet.
How crowded this one gets
A guess, projected from the 2025 statements — the last year where both the submission counts and the winners were published.
Quieter than 79% of the 226 · #48 of 226 by expected field
Few teams are likely to go here. The best odds on the board come from statements like this.
Why: defence, intelligence and space bodies drew small fields.
This is a guess, not a fact
Nobody has published 2026’s numbers yet. This is an analysed estimate from last year’s pattern, so please do not take it as the truth — check the live counter on the SIH portal before you decide anything. The range covers the middle half of likely outcomes, so one statement in two lands outside it. Entry closes at 500 ideas per statement, so no range goes past that — a statement that reaches the cap fills and shuts rather than drawing an unlimited crowd. The model reads only three things a team can see before choosing — software or hardware, the theme, and what kind of body posted it — and those explain about a quarter of the variation in last year’s field sizes (R² 0.25 on held-out statements). Trust the band more than the number, and the ordering more than either. It cannot see how good your idea is, which is the part that actually decides it.
The scores
The number is the shorthand. The line under it is the reason.
Acceptance potential
3/5Genuinely useful and precisely specified, but it overlaps SIH26182 so closely that a judge may treat them as one, commercial tools already do this, the label-set dependency caps attribution, and the mixer, bridge and DeFi cases it explicitly names are exactly where tracing breaks.
Feasibility
3/5The same public-chain tracing and clustering as its sibling apply and are achievable, but the near-real-time requirement across multiple chains and the DeFi, mixer and bridge cases the description explicitly names are genuinely hard, and attribution still depends on the sparse public VASP labels.
Innovation scope
3/5This is largely the same tracing-and-clustering problem as SIH26182 with a victim-report entry point and added laundering-pattern detection, so the room is in the pattern detection and real-time performance rather than in a new concept.
Clarity
5/5The description enumerates the ingestion source, the tracing and clustering tasks, the specific hard cases — mixers, bridges, DeFi — the portal integrations and the dashboard outputs, making it precisely specified.
Effort
MassiveNear-real-time multi-chain tracing, laundering-pattern detection, cross-chain handling, risk categorisation and portal integration is a large, demanding build.
Demo-ability
EasyTracing a reported wallet through its laundering hops to an exchange, with intermediaries flagged, is a concrete and compelling investigative demo.
In its favour
- Green flag: Public blockchain data means the tracing runs on real on-chain data with no access barrier
- Green flag: The victim-report entry point and portal integration give it a clear operational workflow a judge can follow
- Green flag: Flagging intermediary laundering wallets along the trace is a genuinely useful investigative output beyond bare attribution
- Green flag: Fund recovery is a concrete, sympathetic outcome that makes the impact case easy
Against it
- Red flag: It overlaps SIH26182 from the same ministry so heavily that the two are nearly the same product with different entry points
- Red flag: The description names mixers, bridges and DeFi as in-scope, and these are exactly the mechanisms that break blockchain tracing
- Red flag: Attribution accuracy is capped by the sparse public VASP label set, the same constraint as its sibling
- Red flag: Commercial tools already do near-real-time crypto tracing, so the novelty bar is set high
What you will be writing
- Real-time multi-chain transaction tracing
- Laundering-pattern and layering detection
- Cross-chain bridge and mixer tracing
- Exchange-wallet clustering
- Wallet risk categorisation
- SAHYOG / NCRP integration + dashboard
- Blockchain forensics
- Cyber fraud investigation
- Financial crime
Prior art to read before you start
victim-report wallet attribution · laundering pattern detection · real-time fund tracing
Analysed by Claude Opus. Every score above is a judgment call with its reasoning attached — kindly cross-check this against the official statement on the SIH portal before your team commits to it.