The D.C. Circuit upheld admission of Chainalysis Reactor evidence in United States v. Sterlingov, extending a prior district court Daubert ruling.

Chainalysis said its Reactor blockchain analytics platform has now survived Daubert scrutiny in two levels of federal court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a district court ruling admitting Reactor-based testimony in United States v. Sterlingov. The decision matters because it extends a case-specific evidentiary ruling that Chainalysis says strengthens the legal foundation for its attribution methodology in investigations and compliance work.

In the underlying Sterlingov case, a federal court found in 2024 that Reactor met the threshold for admissibility as evidence at trial, according to Chainalysis and the materials provided. The D.C. Circuit later affirmed the conviction on Sept. 25, 2026, and the company’s Oct. 13, 2026 post says the appellate court rejected Sterlingov’s renewed challenge to Reactor’s admissibility. The company said the appellate court relied on multiple factors, including Reactor’s clustering methodology, its track record and its use by law enforcement and private-sector specialists.

According to Chainalysis, the Sterlingov case involved evidence linking Bitcoin Fog to darknet-market activity, with Reactor used to examine transaction flows and attribute more than 900,000 Bitcoin addresses to the mixer service. The company also said expert testimony from FBI Specialist Luke Scholl and Chainalysis expert Elizabeth Bisbee supported the methodology at trial. The appellate court, Chainalysis said, was not persuaded by arguments that Reactor was unreliable because it had not been peer reviewed or assigned a known error rate, noting that peer review is not necessarily expected in a relatively new and specialized field such as blockchain analysis.

Source link