Onyze wins trust from banking
clients and prepares for MiCA
using Chainalysis

CUSTOMER STORYCustomer Story | Onyze

Onyze wins trust from banking clients andprepares for MiCA using Chainalysis
Company name: Onyze
Type of business: Crypto custody
Chainalysis solutions: Crypto Compliance Solution, Crypto Investigations Solution
HQ/Operating region: Spain

Founded in 2019, Onyze is a crypto custody platform
with a mission to help institutions and companies
obtain regulated and safe access to the digital assets
industry, and take advantage of new opportunities.
Onyze was born with the idea of being more than acustodian, and is the ﬁrst crypto exchange in Spain toserve ﬁnancial institutions. The company provides
Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) solutions for businesses
entering the crypto asset industry and wallet
management solutions for real-world asset
tokenization projects.

CHALLENGE

Meet MiCA regulatory standards andbetter serve ﬁnancial institutions
Onyze promotes a compliance-by-design culture. Inorder to meet Spain’s AML regulations for providing
CaaS solutions to ﬁnancial institutions, theorganization needed to not only understand risk
surrounding its own user activity, but convey trust to
the banks it would serve, so those organizations could
provide the same services to their customers.
To achieve this balancing act requires the right tools,
and Onyze was using blockchain analysis solutions
that weren’t meeting its needs. “It’s crucial for banks
to understand the risks they’re facing in providing
crypto custody services to customers at the user,wallet, and blockchain level, as well as the assets
being traded,” said Enrique Palacios Rojo, Chief
Compliance Ofﬁcer at Onyze. “We didn’t have support
for the assets we wanted and it took months for thesolution provider to implement those.”
Additionally, given the EU’s passage of The Markets in
Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCA) in June 2023, Onyze
must now go beyond the traditional regulatorycompliance tasks it had been expected to perform.

This meant that Onyze needed to prioritize:■

Innovation and using technological tools thatdifferentiate it in the market.

■

Proactive risk assessment for crypto assetsthat would instill conﬁdence in its banking
partners, and build an excellent reputation
across the ﬁnancial sector.

“We have been creating protocols and we’ve been
adopting the highest standard, especially that thebanks have, in order to comply with these regulations
because we know that the institutional banks will be
our future customers,” said Palacios Rojo.

SOLUTION

Obtain a broader, more accurate
on-chain data set used by regulators
Once the Onyze compliance team tested theChainalysis Compliance solution, it decided to makethe switch. Palacios Rojo says, “We realized
Chainalysis provided the most support of crypto
assets listed in the market, and personalized technicalassistance to quickly implement new assets orfeatures.”
In implementing Chainalysis, the Onyze complianceteam combined transaction risking tasks with internal
systems to detect alerts and behavioral patterns,

which helped it reduce some manual processes.
Additionally, the way Chainalysis handles risk
assessments of crypto addresses helped speed theteam’s workﬂow. Whereas some blockchain
analysis solutions use a risk indicator that may or
may not be accurate over time, Chainalysis
provides all the addresses for review, and given its
cross-chain capabilities, the compliance teambecame more conﬁdent in the work they were doing.

Customer Story | Onyze
Palacios Rojo explained that the team trusts thetraceability of funds that Chainalysis provides, andcan implement controls similar to any ﬁnancial
institution. And because it’s critical for Onyze’s
banking clients to fully understand risks associatedwith cryptocurrency, it has reassured them to knowthat Chainalysis is one of the solutions many
European regulators use to investigate reportedtransactions.
That regulators are using Chainalysis has helped
Palacios Rojo’s team, too. Onyze analysts andregulators are looking at the same data set andspeaking the same language, making conversations
easier and improving the relationship. It’s alsoreassuring to regulators that the reports Onyze sends
them are coming from a trusted provider.
As for onboarding, the Onyze compliance team foundthat Chainalysis provides good training andintegration with its internal system, as well as a
dedicated customer service team which Palacios Rojosays makes a difference.

“Based on our experience andafter having used some otherblockchain analysis tools,
Chainalysis is the best in themarket when it comes tocomplying with regulation.”
Enrique Palacios Rojo
Chief Compliance Ofﬁcer, Onyze

RESULTS

More trust earned from banks andregulators
Since implementing Chainalysis, Onyze has found it
helps the company stay more compliant with evolving
regulations for a few reasons. First, Palacios Rojo
said, “Chainalysis is incredibly fast in updating
OFAC’s sanctioned wallets and proactive in sharing
reports,

webinars, and hosting events that bring the mostrelevant players to discuss the latest regulation andissues concerning the ﬁnancial industry.”
Additionally, having access to better data has madethe compliance team’s periodic due diligence reports
more accurate. Analysts spend less time searching fortransactions, and because of how Chainalysis
visualizes and measures wallet risk, they have been
detecting more potentially suspicious activity andﬁling higher-quality Suspicious Activity Reports(SARs). These reports are more intuitive andcomprehensive for third parties to review, and thisalso helps when it comes time to train new analysts
using Chainalysis.
“It’s very important for us to have reliability in thedata in order to build a report, knowing that whatwe’re presenting is absolutely true before we deliver
it to the supervisor,” says Palacios Rojo. He explained
this wasn’t always the case when using other tools,
when regulators would question the source ofthe data.
The reliability of the data has also instilled trust in
Onyze leadership, the banking customers it serves,and its partners. The net effect is that Onyze isbuilding more trust with ﬁnancial institutions andregulators, and has reduced and mitigated the risk ofbeing sanctioned.
“Based on our experience and after having used someother blockchain analysis tools, Chainalysis is the bestin the market when it comes to complying withregulation,” Palacios Rojo.
As for the future, he’s most excited about exploringnew dimensions for merging the crypto and ﬁatworlds. He believes there’s room in the market fora solution to help with that, and thinks it's possible
as Onyze continues to discover new needs for theﬁnancial institutions it serves, as well as its
own users.

Building Trustin Blockchains
About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research togovernment agencies, exchanges, ﬁnancial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies
in over 70 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence softwarethat has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-proﬁle criminal cases and grow consumer
access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, GIC, Paradigm,Ribbit, and other leading ﬁrms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote
more ﬁnancial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.