Every Hollywood thriller now uses the same shorthand: a villain needs to move dirty money, so they pay in crypto. That stigma follows the industry everywhere, and Dennis Luks has built a company to push back against it. He is the Head of Growth at Nominis, and the name is the whole thesis. Nominis is Latin for “reputation,” and the company exists to protect the reputation of crypto by keeping the bad actors out.
| What You Need to Know |
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| 1Interview recorded at Money 20/20 Europe 2026, 2 to 4 June, at the Amsterdam RAI. |
| 2Dennis Luks is Head of Growth at Nominis, a crypto-intelligence and AML platform based in Tel Aviv (Nominis is Latin for "reputation"). |
| 3His core point: the crimes happening "on crypto" are the same crimes that predate it; it is not crypto crime, just crime on a new rail. |
| 4Nominis combines on-chain analysis with deep web, open web, dark web, social media, and behavioral and geo-intelligence to tell the full transaction story. |
| 5He treats a mixer like Tornado Cash as a flag, not a verdict, lets clients tune risk scores to their own policy, and sees regulation as a true enabler. |
What made the conversation at Money 20/20 Europe refreshing was Luks’s relentless optimism in a field built on suspicion. His central argument flips the usual framing on its head: the problem is not that crypto is uniquely criminal, it is that most compliance teams are looking in the wrong place entirely.
It’s not crypto crime, it’s just crime
Luks did not deny the problem; he reframed it. Look at the history of financial systems, he said, and you see that the crimes happening on crypto today, human trafficking, terrorism financing, money laundering, scams, all existed long before crypto. Crypto is simply a new way to facilitate them.
That distinction leads to his sharpest insight about why compliance so often fails.
“It’s not really crypto crime, it’s just regular crime happening on crypto. The major challenge that stops compliance departments from being efficient is that they’re focusing only on what’s happening on the chain. If you take a step back and understand that the crime is happening in the real world, you want to look at the real world.”
This is the foundation of how Nominis works. Rather than staring only at the blockchain, it combines on-chain activity with deep web, open web and dark web sources, social media, and behavioural and geo-intelligence, to tell the full transaction story. The goal is to know whether a wallet belongs to a criminal network or a genuine user, and the only way to know that is to look beyond the ledger to the human behind it. It is the same instinct that Trustfull applies to onboarding, pointed specifically at the chain.
AI for the good guys, and the data that powers it
With agentic payments threatening to send transaction volumes soaring, I asked how Nominis stays ahead of criminals who now have AI too. Luks, predictably, found the optimistic angle: if the bad guys have AI, so do the good guys, and the defenders can keep up or pull ahead. As the economy shifts from human-first payments to agentic ones, volumes will explode, and the only way compliance teams cope is to use AI themselves.
But he was clear-eyed about the catch, and it is a lesson well beyond crypto. AI is only as good as the context it is given. “AI needs the right data to make the appropriate decisions,” he said, and that is the number one requirement for any compliance team, at a bank, a crypto firm or a fintech: get the correct data to train your models on. The flashy AI layer is worthless without the unglamorous data foundation underneath it.
The mixer problem: a flag, not a verdict
The hardest question in this space is where intelligence ends and surveillance begins, and I pressed Luks on it. His answer was honest enough to admit there is no silver bullet: it depends on your region, your regulator, your business, and your risk appetite. But his worked example was genuinely useful.
Say someone uses a mixer like Tornado Cash because they value privacy. That does not make them a criminal, Luks stressed, and treating everyone who uses a mixer as guilty would be wrong. But it does raise a flag: if you receive funds from a mixer, expect to answer some questions. Crucially, Nominis sits as an intelligence layer, not a judge. It surfaces the signals, a transaction was exposed to a scammer five hops ago, say, but it also indicates that the exposure is only 0.01% of the wallet, and then the business makes the call based on its own risk policy. A firm operating in Dubai might have near-zero tolerance for gambling exposure; one in Malta might not care. Nominis sets the risk scores with each client rather than imposing one rigid standard, and everything it does is built on open-source intelligence, the transparent, public footprint that the blockchain and the wider web already expose.
Why regulation is a friend
Like nearly every guest this week, Luks lands firmly on the pro-regulation side, and his reasoning is about trust as a growth engine. The wave of clarity arriving now, MiCA in Europe, the GENIUS Act and the hoped-for CLARITY Act in the US, is what lets businesses sleep at night because they finally know the rules. Clear guidance, he argued, is precisely what companies were asking for, and it opens the door to far more adoption. He told me about a major European fintech he has known for six years that would have called him crazy for suggesting crypto back then, and is now deep in it. “I really don’t think that’s possible without regulation and compliance,” he said. “Compliance is a true enabler, not a blocker.” As a user, you want to feel safe putting your money on a regulated platform, and that feeling is what grows the market.
Why this is significant for the Dutch and European reader
One of the most useful threads for a European audience was Luks’s refusal to stigmatise by geography. Reports about scams tend to cluster around certain countries, and I asked whether Nominis works to fix those reputations. His answer was that everything is data-based: sanctioned entities and high-risk jurisdictions are marked because the law requires it, not because of a stereotype, and a clean wallet is a clean wallet wherever it sits.
Where that becomes powerful is in the audit trail. African crypto firms in particular are reaching out, he said because stablecoins are an enormous opportunity there and these companies need to prove a clean record to regulators. Nominis gives them a documented trail: if a wallet was screened clean today but turns dirty three months later, and the regulator comes knocking, the firm can show exactly why it made the decision it did and what changed. For Dutch and European businesses, the lesson generalises. As compliance obligations tighten under MiCA, the value is not just in blocking bad actors but in being able to prove, on demand, that you acted reasonably. A stablecoin platform wants to stay a stablecoin platform, as Luks put it, not turn into a compliance company, and the firms that provide that proof as a service are quietly essential to the ecosystem’s reputation. For a complementary take, see our interview with wallet-risk platform WAML.
This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations with the people protecting the crypto ecosystem, watch the full Cryptofocus series.
