Overview
- Investigators disclosed in late May that they traced roughly €1 million in alleged undeclared gains tied to Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 activity and say they have unmasked a suspect using that trail.
- The probe began from a seized Ledger hardware wallet and used Chainalysis Reactor to rebuild a multi-year pattern of transactions that initially looked fragmented across many addresses.
- Analysts applied a common-input-ownership heuristic to link those addresses to one controlling entity and mapped a recurring cycle of minting inscriptions, listing assets, selling them, and routing Bitcoin proceeds back into new inscriptions.
- Judicial disclosure orders secured Know Your Customer records from centralized exchanges, and cross-checking those records with the on-chain map provided the identity link investigators needed to pinpoint the individual.
- The case underlines that Ordinals and BRC-20 do not guarantee anonymity, highlights gaps in crypto tax reporting, and could prompt wider use of blockchain intelligence and targeted rules or reporting changes by tax authorities.