Portrait of Bernhard Haslhofer, research group leader at Complexity Science Hub Vienna.

Short bio: EN | DE

Bernhard Haslhofer, Cryptoasset Analytics & Blockchain Forensics Researcher

I lead the Digital Currency Ecosystems research group at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. My research develops computational methods for cryptoasset analytics and decentralized finance, digital crime and forensics, and large-scale disinformation.

I co-founded Iknaio Cryptoasset Analytics and serve as a court-certified expert in IT and cryptoasset forensics. I also teach courses on these topics at TU Wien.

Impact

Societal Impact: Data-driven methods that translate into safer digital ecosystems. A recent example is the takedown of over 370,000 illegal dark web sites, in collaboration with the Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime.
Industry & Adoption: The Iknaio spin-off and the open-source GraphSense platform, used by financial institutions, regulators, and investigators across sectors.
Policy & Regulation: Evidence to inform central banks (BIS), international forums (INTERPOL), and European policy debate (Forum Alpbach).
Standards & Open Infrastructure: The Europeana Linked Open Data pilot, ResourceSync (NISO), Open Annotation (W3C), and ongoing work toward harmonised standards for blockchain intelligence.

Recent News

May 2026

I am co-organizing this year's Frontiers in DeFi workshop at the Einstein Center Berlin.

Mar 2026

Research Impact: our investigation methods ultimately led to the crackdown of over 373,000 dark web sites.

Mar 2026

Our paper on Credibility Matters: Motivations, Characteristics, and Influence Mechanisms of Crypto Key Opinion Leaders has been accepted at ACM CHI 2026.

Mar 2026

We are hosting this year's edition of the Cryptoasset Analytics Workshop (CAAW), co-located with Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2026.

Feb 2026

The idCLUES project on identifying complex laundering and underlying exchange schemes has started.

Feb 2026

We are going to host the upcoming Illicit Network Workshop at the Complexity Science Hub from June 29-30. Call for proposals is open until March 2 2026.

Jan 2026

New preprint: Reuse of Public Keys Across UTXO and Account-Based Cryptocurrencies, will be presented at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2026.

Jan 2026

Our paper on Linking Cryptoasset Attribution Tags to Knowledge Graph Entities: An LLM-based Approach just got published.

Nov 2025

We are hosting a workshop on Digital Crypto-Estates at the Complexity Science Hub.

Nov 2025

New pre-print entitled Slaying the Dragon: The Quest for Democracy in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) is now available on arXiv.