SEC Seeks To Gather Transaction Records From Popular Blockchain Ledger

The United States Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) plans to gather financial data (transaction records) from Bitcoin and Ethereum ledger through contractors, in addition to as many as possible of the following blockchains: Bitcoin Cash, Stellar, Zcash, EOS, NEO, and XRP Ledger and plans to add more blockchain entrants as they gain prominence in the marketplace.

As of press time, 20 contractors(& agencies) have applied. ArcBlock Inc., Quant Network Ltd, ZenLedger, MI2 Holdings Inc., Coin Metrics Inc., etc. are among these contractors who expressed their interest to collaborate and provide the needed information to SEC.

Source: Federal Business Opportunities, a U.S government’s website to post all Federal procurement opportunities.

What SEC plans to do with this data?

The Bitcoin network is currently handling around 350,000 and Ethereum around 600,000 transactions per day, both with an upward trend. 
With increasing utility of cryptocurrencies, the data (or transaction records) within the blockchain continues to grow and making its way into banking, micropayments, remittances, and other financial services.

As a result, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is gearing up its efforts to monitor transactions recorded in several blockchain ledgers. The plan is to track potential risks like money-laundering and build improved compliance and commission policy with respect to digital assets.

What information will be monitored:

The key information SEC is interested to track for the purpose of financial audit on each blockchain ledger are:

– addresses (sent/ received), 
– transaction hash; transaction fees,
– the timestamp of transactions,
– transaction amounts,
– unspent balance (sent/ received),
– confirmations; block hash; and block height.

According to the SEC guidelines, the contractor should provide the desired blockchain data from hosted nodes (primary source), rather than providing this data as a secondary source (e.g., via blockchain explorers) and should include the full blockchain ledgers, since inception (genesis block) for all provided blockchains.

Additionally, the SEC expects from the contractor to provide overview analysis for the blockchains. This summary data would include things such as hashing algorithms, hashing power, mining difficulty and rewards, transaction quantity and size, coin supply and blockchain size.

SEC posted this contract in FBO.GOV site on 26th June 2019.

To know more about the requirements from SEC, check attachment(1) enclosed in this contract.