Introduction
Among the digital tools emerging in today’s decentralised financial framework, cryptocurrency has been especially attractive for extremist fundraising by providing new opportunities to circumvent regulations. Between 2012 and 2024, extremist groups in Europe and North America received over 21 million USD in cryptocurrencies; and although the overall cryptocurrency contributions to extremist groups have declined, Europe has experienced an increase in its share of extremist cryptocurrency inflows between 2022 and 2024. This increase is largely associated with right-wing extremist groups – European white supremacists/nationalists had an almost 270% increase in average cryptocurrency deposits between 2023 and 2024, reflecting a greater intensity of donor support. This Insight explains how cryptocurrency donations to extremist groups – focusing specifically on white supremacists/nationalists – can be tracked and analysed with Social Network Analysis tools, such as clustering and bipartite graphs.
In the discussion around the uptake of cryptocurrency solicitation and donation by extremists, white supremacist/nationalist groups have been less present compared to Islamic terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Yet, white supremacists were early adopters of cryptocurrencies: the crypto-activities of actors such as Stefan Molyneux or Andrew Anglin (editor of The Daily Stormer) go back to 2013 and 2014, respectively. Parallels have also been drawn between the libertarian-leaning values underlying cryptocurrency and the disdain for government found in white supremacist/nationalist groups, reinforcing the connection between the two.
Why Extremist Groups Use Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies are digital or virtual currencies, also known as coins, that rely on cryptographic tools to secure and conduct payments, mainly through blockchain technologies. The blockchain provides a distributed public ledger where data is stored in a new and unique encrypted ‘block’ any time the ledger is accessed. The new and old blocks are ‘chained’ together, creating an accessible and transparent data history of transactions. As such, cryptocurrencies operate in a peer-to-peer system that skips over the need for traditional centralised banks to oversee transactions by instead transferring funds directly between digital wallets. Coins are then converted back into regular (fiat) currency through Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) such as Kraken, Coinbase and CashApp, which serve as an access point to the blockchain.
The decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies is one of the main reasons for their increased uptake. By operating outside the reach of central banks, extremist groups perceive the cryptocurrency market as free from oversight and, therefore, able to transcend borders, sanctions, and regulations. With cryptocurrencies combining decentralisation and digitalisation, freezing transactions and confiscating assets has become more complicated while simultaneously providing novel ways to evade law enforcement. One notable technique is ‘chain hopping’ where blockchain bridges allow for assets to be moved from one blockchain to another. For example, Wrapped Bitcoin is a bridge that converts Bitcoin into Ethereum. As bridges often lack identity verification, chain hopping has been a useful tool for extremist groups to create a smokescreen to obscure their funding campaigns. This perceived liberation from authority, combined with the growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies, has subsequently made crypto-coins a more viable option for extremist groups. Moreover, for white supremacist groups, avoiding traditional financial systems brings the added benefit of escaping the so-called “Jewish-controlled” system, allowing them to collect and move funds in a structure that matches their own antisemitic beliefs.
Another reason why cryptocurrencies attract extremist groups is the perception that they provide anonymity. Transactions using coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum generally do not identify who is sending and/or receiving money. Instead, cryptocurrency addresses are long, unique strings of letters and numbers which obfuscate who owns the coins, protecting the covert nature of extremist groups and adding to the opacity of extremist funding flows. Moreover, as regulators learn to use the blockchain’s transparent public ledger to unmask users, white supremacist entities like The Daily Stormer have turned to ‘privacy coins’, notably Monero and ZCash. Designed to reduce traceability and maximize anonymity, privacy coins create new dynamic ‘stealth’ addresses and cluster users to hide their identities. Further, they apply zero-knowledge cryptography, where transactions are validated without revealing additional information. While these coins provide more anonymity, it is important to note that their ease of use is lower and their volatility is higher than normal coins, which creates mental blocks among the fans and potential donors of white supremacists, slowing their uptake.
The Challenges of Regulation
In recent years, important regulator pushback on cryptocurrency-backed extremism has occurred, led notably by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). But as threats from cryptocurrency are still emerging, so is the regulatory framework.
The implementation of uniform standards is a prominent challenge to cryptocurrency regulation. While actors like the FATF design threat responses and set international standards, implementation remains in the hands of states and national financial institutions. This has enabled loopholes through which extremist funding campaigns can occur, as inconsistencies in regulation create grey areas that complicate the tracking, reporting and disruption of cryptocurrency flows. White supremacist/nationalist groups, in particular, benefit from these inconsistencies, advantaged by the fact that many of them are absent from Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) lists. For example, in December 2020, a French programmer was able to transfer over 410,000 EUR worth of Bitcoin to various American white supremacist entities and influencers, including the Daily Stormer and Nick Fuentes. As groups banned in one country may exercise freely in another, decentralised extremist movements are able to survive with the support of transnational coin transfers. This highlights the need for adaptable network-based regulatory approaches that account for the hierarchies of decentralised extremist groups, like white supremacist/nationalist groups.
The novel nature of cryptocurrencies has complicated regulation; traditional methods of countering extremist financial flows do not always transfer to the fluid and adaptable digital environment. This was highlighted with the crypto-mixer Tornado Cash, which faced (now overturned) sanctions in 2022 for mixing and concealing North Korean money in a pool of other crypto-assets. Since their code could run without central oversight, they were able to continue functioning in spite of sanctions, limiting the disturbance placed on extremist cryptocurrency flows. Hence, regulatory attention is often turned towards VASPs.
Yet, regulating VASPs links back to the challenges of inconsistent regulation. VASPs generally require oversight only if they are licensed and registered, and the need for them to be registered is dependent on their jurisdiction. While some VASPs have responded to calls for increased moderation and accountability – such as removing access to privacy coins and developing user policies to prohibit extremism and calls for violence – others maintain their hands-off approach, rendering them popular among white supremacist/nationalist groups. In 2022, Kraken’s CEO circulated a document instructing employees to “avoid censoring others” – the platform transferred over 70,000 USD in extremist funds in 2023, including to white supremacist groups like Counter-Currents and the National Socialist Movement.
The challenges of regulating cryptocurrency underscore the need for more effective policies and responses, emphasising improved tracking of cryptocurrency flows and a deeper understanding of blockchain networks.
Social Network Analysis: A Piece of the Cryptocurrency Puzzle
‘Blockchain analysis’ is often mentioned when studying cryptocurrency exchanges, including extremist financial flows. Blockchain analysis draws on Social Network Analysis (SNA) to identify nodes/accounts, cluster nodes, and map out the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency network. Using SNA tools, blockchain analysis applies network properties to blockchain transactions, facilitating the study of user interactions.
Tracking Extremist Funding Flows
As SNA explores the relationships between entities to explain social phenomena and the implications of a system’s connections, it has found its place in extremism studies. It has been used to study the internal structure of extremist organisations, to fight terrorist groups, and to track and disrupt terrorist financial networks. In their 2024 report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) used network graphs to visualise the flow of 142,546 USD between extremist actors and VASPs like Kraken, Gemini, and Binance. Similarly, the 2025 Chainanalysis report incorporated network theory to study extremist funding patterns, including how groups deliberately blend ideologies to access more financial flows.
In tracking extremist funds, SNA can also be used to follow ‘peel chains.’ In a peel chain, a large initial sum is transferred through a series of crypto-wallets where small amounts are ‘peeled off’ in each wallet until the remainder is returned to the original user at a ‘change’ address (a newly generated address that receives the leftover ‘change’ from the original transaction). For extremist groups, peel chains obscure coin transfers through multiple micro-transactions, which are less likely to be flagged as suspicious and make it harder to track the origin and the final destination. Albeit more complex, mapping out the network with the support of transaction monitoring tools still allows for the peel chain to be detected. Additionally, distinguishing the change addresses can facilitate tracing the funds by providing the original and final values, imparting the specific amounts to look for within the noise of the blockchain. Once the peel chain is detected, clustering can also be used to categorise the relevant wallets under one extremist group.
Bipartite Graphs and Clustering Extremist Actors
As the Chainanalysis report highlighted, applying network concepts like bipartite graphs – which form connections between disjointed sets – has great value in tracing how individuals often donate to multiple extremist causes (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Bipartite Network Demonstrating Multiple Donations from Individuals (Source: Chainanalysis)
Expanding on Figure 1, Figure 2 demonstrates hypothetical cryptocurrency flows from individual donors (blue nodes) to extremist groups belonging to two different ideologies.
Per bipartite network properties, these extremist groups can be linked if they share a donor which, in turn, allows for ideological clusters to be identified via cryptocurrency flows (Figure 3). For example, the weighted line between B1 and A2 resulting from multiple individual donors financing both groups implies not only that these groups are popular but also that their content overlaps between ideologies A and B.
Identifying ideological clusters and overlaps via funding patterns provides a better understanding of the overall extremist network and helps draw out nodes like B1 and A2, which can be gateways to radicalisation. This is relevant to ideologies like white supremacy, which blends with conspiracy theories, antisemitic sentiments, far-right politics, and the Manosphere. Moreover, considering how an extremist cryptocurrency network evolves over time can provide information on radicalisation patterns as well as the growing (or waning) popularity of extremist groups.
Clustering algorithms not only map out transactions but can also identify clusters of associated digital wallets to reveal real-life identities. One method to cluster crypto-wallets is by tracking when coins from two or more wallets are spent in a single transaction: this becomes a ‘multi-input’ transaction that, in order to occur, requires a single user to control both crypto-addresses. Furthermore, wallet clusters allow for cryptocurrency flows to be tracked to the exit points where they enter regular bank accounts, tying them to a real-life identity. In the white supremacy donor space where most inflows consist of small individual contributions, sometimes as small as 50 cents a week, tracking multi-input transactions is especially useful and can still serve against actors like Anglin who moved to Monero but who likely still need an exit point.
Conclusion
Overall, the application of SNA in blockchain analysis has utility in encouraging a paradigm shift in financial monitoring. As white supremacists/nationalists (and other extremist groups) continue to use cryptocurrencies as a new way to obtain funding, financial institutions, regulators, and VASPs need to expand beyond the know-your-customer approach and develop methods to monitor transactional patterns. With 21st-century extremist groups as well as their finances being increasingly networked and decentralised, developing an understanding of which cryptocurrency flows are more likely to be associated with extremist funding is crucial. Without extremist behaviours and patterns like peel chains, only a partial picture of the extremist funding network can be constructed, which limits the effectiveness of responses.
Clara Jammot is a PhD student in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London whose research examines the ties between international security and technology, with a particular focus on the nexus between algorithms, ontological security, and extremism. Her thesis explores how algorithms influence perceptions of self and of security in extremist masculinist online communities, questioning the way identity and community are formed online. Clara has also worked for the European Cyber Security Organization (ECSO) and with consultancy firms researching the digital transformation of business and society and peacebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected settings.