Blockchain forensics firm Elliptic said it has made advances in using artificial intelligence to detect bitcoin money laundering.

The firm said in a statement that it is using the advancements to enhance Elliptic's detection tools and has detailed the work in a new research paper "co-authored with researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab."

"A deep learning model is used to successfully identify proceeds of crime deposited at a crypto exchange, new money laundering transaction patterns and previously-unknown illicit wallets," the firm said in its statement.

Elliptic said it tested the enhanced tools on a dataset that contains over 200 million transactions.

"Rather than identifying transactions made by illicit actors, a machine learning model is trained to identify 'subgraphs,' chains …