Pluto Digital calls on Elliptic to make its Yield Optimisation Platform safer

Crypto technology company Pluto Digital has partnered with cryptoasset risk management firm Elliptic to protect the company and its customers from criminal activity. 

It has been agreed that Elliptic will provide blockchain analytics and screening solutions for Pluto's Yield Optimization Platform (YOP). 

YOP is a DeFi yield farming platform which allows customers to stake or lend cryptoassets in return for interest and other rewards.

Pluto has harnessed Elliptic's wallet screening solution - Lens - to screen crypto wallets using the YOP platform in real-time and protect itself and its customers from financial crime. 

Last week, Elliptic launched its Holistic Screening solution for cross-chain bridges, which helped track $540m in laundered funds on the RenBridge cross-chain. 

Elliptic identified that cybercriminals like North Korea's Lazarus Group and Russia's Wizard Spider gang took part in the laundering activities. 

This news came on the back of the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioning crypto mixer Tornado cash for laundering $7bn worth of crypto. 

Both Lazarus and Wizard Spider were involved in Tornado cash, a crypto mixer that anonymises the origin and identities of its funds and investors.

"We need to protect our company, our reputation and our customers and this means we need to know where crypto is coming from", said Dave Burrells, the chief operating officer at Pluto Digital. 

 Burrells said that illicit actors, including North Korean state-sponsored hackers the Lazarus Group, had been identified and blocked from interacting with the platform on day one.