Marcin Zarakowski and Patrick Prinz joined Currency of Power to examine where stolen assets can be stopped, how AI changes fraud and why Europe needs its own blockchain intelligence capability.
Crypto asset recovery begins with a contradiction. A transfer recorded on a public blockchain can be followed across wallets and services, yet the institutions capable of acting on that intelligence remain divided by borders, procedures and response times.
In a new episode of Currency of Power, hosts Marieke Flament and Nicolas Colin speak with Recoveris CEO Marcin Zarakowski and COO/CFO Patrick Prinz about that gap. The discussion moves from individual fraud cases to a much larger question: what investigative infrastructure will be needed when stablecoins, tokenized financial instruments and AI agents become ordinary parts of the financial system?
The title captures the victim’s first problem. If a bank card is compromised, the issuer can replace it. If assets leave a self-custodied wallet, there may be no central operator to reverse the transaction. Tracing can show where the assets went, but a transaction path alone does not freeze a wallet, establish jurisdiction or return funds.
Crypto asset recovery is a race between seconds and months
The most striking contrast in the conversation comes from research by Dutch prosecutor Tessa van Roomen. Her peer-reviewed study of cross-border criminal crypto investigations found that traditional mutual legal assistance procedures are often inadequate when evidence sits abroad, spans several jurisdictions or falls between competing views of enforcement authority.
Marcin describes the operational mismatch in blunt terms: police officers interviewed for the research reported that preparing a mutual legal assistance request and receiving an answer could take six months, while crypto assets can move around the world in seconds. Translation, central authorities and jurisdiction-specific formalities all take time, so investigators increasingly rely on direct channels, including dedicated exchange portals and trusted public-private networks.
The volume explains why those channels matter. Binance reported that it processed more than 71,000 law-enforcement requests in 2025, a figure also carried by PR Newswire and The Block. Binance’s own response provides the primary account. One exchange handling that many requests is a picture of a system under pressure, not an edge case.
Tracing becomes valuable when it identifies an intervention point
A useful investigation asks more than “where did the money go?” It asks who can act, under which authority and with what evidence.
Centralized exchanges remain important intervention points because they operate accounts, conduct KYC checks and connect crypto assets to banking rails. When stolen funds reach a VASP, investigators may be able to request a temporary restriction while law enforcement, lawyers or courts prepare the formal instrument required for seizure or return.
Stablecoins create a second intervention point. Tether and Circle issue USDT and USDC centrally, which gives them technical controls that do not exist for native assets held in an ordinary self-custodied wallet. Circle’s USDC terms expressly provide for address blocking and freezes in response to valid government orders, while Tether describes freezing external wallets in coordination with law enforcement.
That power does not make recovery automatic. An address still needs to be traced and linked to the incident, the request must reach the right decision-maker, and a defensible legal basis is usually required. The important lesson is narrower: blockchain transactions may be irreversible at protocol level while assets can still encounter institutions capable of restricting their movement.
The Zondacrypto investigation shows what public ledgers can reveal
The podcast also revisits Recoveris’s investigation into Zondacrypto. Analysts examined labelled hot wallets across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tron, compared current balances with historical activity and peer exchanges, and followed outbound flows.
The resulting observations were specific. The monthly average balance of Zondacrypto’s main labelled BTC cluster fell from 55.7 BTC in August 2024 to 0.18 BTC in March 2026, a 99.7% decline. Investigators also identified 511 transfers, worth approximately $21 million, from Zondacrypto-controlled wallets to a single Kraken deposit address. These figures were subsequently reported by Recoveris, money.pl and Wirtualna Polska.
None of those observations proved insolvency by itself. Cold-wallet assets could exist outside the labelled cluster, transfers to another exchange could have legitimate explanations, and correlation does not establish causation. Recoveris and the journalists therefore published the findings as warning signals that required clarification. That restraint is part of good blockchain intelligence: make the evidence visible, distinguish fact from inference and preserve the questions the data cannot answer.
AI is industrializing both deception and money laundering
One of the episode’s most vivid stories concerns a founder lured to a late-night restaurant meeting in Barcelona by people impersonating venture-capital investors. After repeated delays left him exhausted, he was asked to create a fresh mobile wallet as part of a supposed proof-of-liquidity exercise. A camera positioned behind him captured the seed phrase, allowing accomplices to take control as soon as funds arrived.
Marcin connects that physical setup to the broader use of AI in fraud. Criminal groups can profile targets from their online activity, generate messages tailored to individual ambitions or vulnerabilities, operate in almost any language, imitate regional accents and use synthetic audio or video to build trust. AI can then help move and obscure the proceeds.
The asymmetry is uncomfortable. Scam operations are adopting automation across targeting, persuasion and laundering, while many investigations still depend on fragmented manual processes. The answer is accountable investigative automation: systems that accelerate triage and tracing while preserving the sources, reasoning and chain of evidence a prosecutor, compliance officer or court must be able to inspect.
Europe needs blockchain intelligence as financial infrastructure
Patrick’s closing argument moves beyond crypto crime. As more value shifts into stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, blockchain intelligence becomes part of mainstream financial intelligence. AI agents deepen the issue because an agent may be unable to open a traditional bank account while still being able to create wallets and transact in digital assets.
Europe therefore faces a strategic choice. It can depend on foreign analytics software and dollar-denominated stablecoins, or it can build its own competence in on-chain investigations, tokenized finance and accountable enforcement. This is not an argument for isolation. Cross-border recovery requires cooperation. It is an argument for Europe to bring credible capability to that cooperation rather than outsourcing its visibility into the next financial infrastructure.
Watch the full Currency of Power conversation
The full episode covers the origins of Recoveris, the practical limits of law-enforcement coordination, Zondacrypto, AI-assisted fraud, venture-capital impersonation scams, exchange and stablecoin freezes, tokenization and European financial sovereignty.
Watch “There Is Nobody You Can Call” on Currency of Power.
If your platform or users have been affected, immediate forensic intervention can be critical to tracing assets and identifying viable intervention points before the funds reach further obfuscation services.
