Building a 10-Billion Wallet Crypto-Intelligence Platform: Elliptic’s Journey with Amazon DynamoDB

The world of digital assets moves at lightning speed, bringing both new opportunities and new risks. For financial institutions, regulators, and law enforcement agencies, keeping up with the sheer scale of blockchain transactions is a monumental undertaking. That’s where Elliptic comes in. As a leading force in blockchain analytics, Elliptic helps organizations detect and prevent financial crime by providing actionable intelligence drawn from billions of on-chain activities.

Our platform processes data across more than 50 blockchains, 70 cross-chain bridges, and tens of thousands of digital assets each month. On top of raw transaction data, we overlay proprietary signals—such as address categorizations, behavioral patterns, and risk indicators—to spot illicit flows and emerging threats. The biggest challenge? The data is highly skewed. While some wallets are incredibly active, others may see only occasional use. Yet, in the fight against money laundering and fraud, every piece of data matters. If our systems miss a critical piece of information, even for a moment, it could mean the difference between stopping a criminal operation or letting it slip through the cracks.

To build a system that could keep pace with this dynamic, vast, and rapidly evolving ecosystem, Elliptic turned to Amazon DynamoDB. This approach allowed us to scale to more than 10 billion wallets worldwide while maintaining real-time risk detection. Flexibility was essential: in the crypto world, assets and protocols constantly change, and our infrastructure had to adapt just as quickly. By carefully designing our data model and indexing strategies, we’ve created a platform that powers not just real-time analytics but also complex, deep-dive investigations when regulators or law enforcement need to trace the movement of funds across the entire blockchain landscape.

One of the core components is a holistic graph that tracks the aggregate flow of value between wallets over time. Each node represents a wallet or cluster of wallets, and the edges capture the total value transferred. This graph allows us to see everything from rare, low-activity addresses to massive, high-frequency exchanges—with both depth and breadth. DynamoDB’s ability to handle vast scale, low-latency queries, and flexible schemas made this possible, even as the volume and variety of data continued to expand.

But building for the future is about more than raw performance. As the business and technology landscape evolves, we’re focused on creating resilient, intelligent infrastructure that can scale with our customers’ needs. By offloading database management to Amazon DynamoDB, our engineering teams can concentrate on what matters most: developing advanced analytics, deploying machine learning models, and delivering insights that make the digital asset ecosystem safer for everyone.

In summary, Elliptic’s journey with Amazon DynamoDB shows how the right tools can turn immense technical challenges into genuine operational strength. By embracing scalability, flexibility, and real-time performance, we’ve built a crypto-intelligence platform that not only meets today’s demands but is ready for whatever tomorrow brings. Our mission remains unchanged: to bring trust, transparency, and security to the world of digital assets, one transaction at a time.