United States v. Sterlingov

What happened

Roman Sterlingov was prosecuted for operating Bitcoin Fog, a cryptocurrency mixing service used to launder proceeds of darknet markets. The government's primary tracing evidence came from Chainalysis, which uses proprietary centralised heuristic clustering to trace blockchain transactions. The defence filed a comprehensive Daubert challenge, arguing the Chainalysis methodology was not reproducible, had not been independently validated, and had an unknown error rate, the standard objections that apply to any single-source centralised analytics system. To sustain the conviction, the government was required to present multiple independent corroborating sources: IP logs, forum registration records, and data from seized devices. The case is significant not because the challenge succeeded, but because it illustrates that centralised analytics are inherently contestable, and that courts require independent corroboration when the core evidence comes from a single proprietary system.