There is a belief, still surprisingly common, that crypto is anonymous money for people who want to hide. Asif Yagudaev wishes to bury it. “Crypto is not anonymity, as people think,” he told me. “Blockchain is an open system.” Yagudaev is the Chief Business Development Officer of WAML, a risk-intelligence app that scores any wallet or transaction, and his pitch starts from an uncomfortable truth most casual users never consider: when you receive crypto, you inherit its entire history, whether you like it or not.
| 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. |
| 2Asif Yagudaev is Chief Business Development Officer of WAML, a crypto risk-intelligence app that scores any wallet or transaction. |
| 3His core message: crypto was never anonymous; receiving crypto means inheriting its full transaction history, including any past links to sanctions or fraud. |
| 4WAML returns a simple green / medium / red risk score, drawn from what it says are 350+ sources in real time, and shows the money trail and source of funds. |
| 5A "clean" check goes stale the moment a wallet transacts again; push a red-flagged coin onto a major exchange, Yagudaev says, and your funds get frozen "almost 100%" of the time. |
We sat down at Money 20/20 Europe, and where most compliance companies in the hall sell to banks, Yagudaev was pitching something more democratic: a tool simple enough that an ordinary person, a freelancer, a peer-to-peer trader, can check whether the coins about to land in their wallet are clean, before it is too late.
You inherit the money’s past
The idea at the heart of WAML is one that should change how casual users think about receiving crypto. Because the blockchain is a permanent, open ledger, every coin carries its whole history with it.
“When you receive cryptocurrency, you also receive the history of that money. If ten hops ago this money was on the sanctions list or linked to fraud, our system will see that. It’s not your fault, but you should know who you deal with.”
This is the part that catches people out. You can receive a payment in perfectly good faith and find that the coins passed through a sanctioned address or a scam several transactions ago, and that taint now attaches to you. WAML’s job is to make that visible before you accept the funds: it shows the money trail, the source of funds, and a risk score for each transaction. The blockchain’s transparency, the very thing that makes it traceable, is what makes this possible. As analytics firms have long demonstrated, Bitcoin and most crypto are anything but anonymous.
Green, medium, red
WAML’s design choice is radical simplicity. Where professional compliance tools drown you in data, WAML boils the answer down to a traffic light: green is low risk, medium warrants caution, and red means do not touch. For someone not working in crypto professionally, Yagudaev argued, that is all they need to know.
He was careful about where the platform draws its line. WAML is not, he stressed, a privacy or confidentiality tool, and it is noncustodial, it never holds your funds or keys. It simply shows the money and its history. For individuals, the green/medium/red score is enough; for businesses that need more, there is a separate suite (KYC, KYT, transaction monitoring, with KYB and travel-rule features rolling out). And it does not make the decision for you. He compared it to pointing at a hole in the road: “This is high-risk crypto. What to do is up to you, accept or decline.” Some businesses knowingly accept red crypto and take the risk; WAML’s role is only to make sure nobody steps into the hole blind. He says the scoring draws on more than 350 sources in real time, a vendor figure worth taking as the company’s own claim, delivered through an app, a Telegram bot and an API for businesses.
Two warnings worth heeding
Two things Yagudaev said deserve to be pinned up next to every crypto user’s screen. The first is about the shelf life of a clean check, a subtlety most people miss.
“Let’s say I send you money, you check it, it’s all good. Then I do other transactions and come back to you. Another person thinks, I checked you a few days ago, no need to check again. But even one transaction in between could be high risk, and if you interact with that wallet, you’ll be in trouble.”
A risk report, in other words, is a snapshot, not a certificate. The moment a wallet moves again, yesterday’s “clean” verdict is out of date, and WAML flags when a report is stale and needs re-running. The second warning is blunter, and it is the strongest argument for checking at all. If you accept red-flagged crypto and then try to move it onto a major custodial exchange, Binance, Bybit, Coinbase, your funds will very likely be frozen. “Almost 100%,” he said. (That figure is his, drawn from experience rather than published data, but the underlying risk of frozen funds on regulated exchanges is real and well documented.) Keep dirty coins in a noncustodial wallet, and you have merely tainted another address; try to cash them out through a regulated venue, and you can lose them outright.
The compliance layer for everyone else
For businesses, WAML extends into familiar compliance territory, KYC, transaction monitoring (KYT), the FATF travel rule, counterparty checks, with compliance-ready reports designed to satisfy regulators. As Yagudaev pointed out, more countries are treating crypto as real money every year, and that means more businesses suddenly require compliance they never had to think about before. WAML’s pitch there is the same as its consumer one, just scaled up: make the risk legible, attach a number to it, and let the business decide what it can live with.
It is worth being clear-eyed: WAML is an early-stage product, and some of its standout figures are its claims rather than independently audited facts. But the underlying problem it targets is entirely real, and getting more real by the day. Illicit crypto flows reached record levels in 2025, and a growing share moves through stablecoins, the exact rails the rest of Money 20/20 spent the week celebrating.
Why this is relevant for the Dutch and European reader
For European crypto users, WAML’s message is a useful corrective to two opposite myths at once. To anyone who still thinks crypto is a private way to move money beyond anyone’s view, the answer is that the blockchain remembers everything, forever, and that history can land on you unexpected. And to anyone scared off by that, the reassurance is that the same transparency makes the risk checkable in seconds, before you ever accept a payment.
As MiCA pushes European crypto firmly into the regulated mainstream, the practical takeaway is a habit worth forming: check the wallet before you transact, and remember that a clean result expires. For a freelancer in Rotterdam being paid in USDT, or a small business accepting crypto for the first time, that simple discipline is the difference between getting paid and watching an exchange freeze funds you did nothing wrong to receive. For a more in-depth look at the intelligence side of this problem, read our interview with Nominis.
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.
