Open Blockchain Intelligence Standards#

An international standards body for blockchain data and informatics.

Blockchain intelligence is transitioning from an emerging field into an established professional domain — used by investigators, prosecutors, supervisors, and researchers in high-stakes settings. The infrastructure that domain depends on has not made the same transition. Data formats vary between platforms, identical concepts carry different names, foundational computations like address clustering follow divergent approaches, and findings produced in one ecosystem are difficult to verify or reuse in another.

OBIS develops open, vendor-neutral specifications to close that gap.

About#

OBIS is modelled on ISO, W3C, and IETF: an open process, published deliverables, no membership tiers, no certification business. Standards are organised around concrete use cases rather than abstract layers, because the gaps that matter most appear at the boundary between organisations doing similar work with incompatible tools.

We are not a certification body, an industry lobby, or a vendor consortium. We are a technical standards organisation.

The motivation for this work has been articulated in detail by the Basel Institute on Governance and others working in the field. OBIS is the venue for turning that motivation into specifications.

Focus areas#

Three use-case domains anchor the first work cycle. Each is grounded in a concrete, documented interoperability problem.

Investigations, forensics, and attribution#

Investigators today work in isolated tool ecosystems with no systematic mechanism for connecting cases across platforms or agencies. Prosecutors struggle to demonstrate the reliability, admissibility, and validity of blockchain evidence in court because no court-proof forensic procedure exists. Judges rely on case-by-case testimony from individual tool providers.

OBIS work in this area: common data models for address attribution, entity clustering, evidence provenance, and confidence scoring — including formats that allow transaction-graph sharing across organisations without exposing proprietary attribution data.

Regulatory reporting and supervision#

Supervisors apply inconsistent methodologies and typologies when assessing virtual-asset activity, and reporting entities maintain bespoke integrations with each supervisor and counterparty they exchange data with.

OBIS work in this area: standardised exchange formats between VASPs, supervisors, and adjacent reporting entities — reducing bespoke integration cost and improving the comparability of supervisory data across jurisdictions.

Open analytics and research data#

Academic and applied research on blockchain data is held back by the absence of shared schemas, labelling conventions, and reproducibility primitives. Each new study re-derives its data layer from raw chain history.

OBIS work in this area: schemas and conventions that let research compound rather than restart — cumulative science on top of blockchain data.

A fourth area — compliance and sanctions screening — is intentionally out of scope at launch. That space is densely commercial and well-served by existing vendor formats; OBIS’s leverage is elsewhere.

Process#

OBIS standards progress through three states: Draft, Public Review, and Published. Drafts are developed in the open on GitHub. A standard reaches Public Review only after a working group has reached rough consensus; it reaches Published only after a public comment period has closed and substantive objections have been addressed.

The full process is specified in OBIS-0001: OBIS Document Lifecycle, currently in Draft.

Get involved#

OBIS is looking for working group chairs, contributors, and reviewers in each focus area — particularly individuals with academic, regulatory, or operational experience in blockchain data.

If you are interested in chairing or co-chairing a working group, write directly. Tell us which focus area, what you would bring, and what you would want OBIS to deliver in the first twelve months.