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Less than one per cent. For the 2025 data year, the Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report 2026 puts the illicit share of attributed crypto transaction volume as follows: “Our estimate for the illicit share of all attributed crypto transaction volume increased slightly from 2024 but remains below 1%.”
Most illicit volume is not Bitcoin
The same source attributes 84 per cent of illicit transaction volume to stablecoins rather than Bitcoin: “stablecoins have come to dominate the landscape of illicit transactions, and now account for 84% of all illicit transaction volume”.
An independent second source points the same way. The widely cited University of Texas at Austin study of pig butchering scams reports as one of its core findings that perpetrators prefer “the stablecoin Tether over other cryptocurrencies and the Ethereum blockchain over Bitcoin”. Of 1.7 trillion US dollars in volume across the addresses covered, 78 per cent is Tether. Broken down by chain, the source material splits into 8.3 billion US dollars on Ethereum, 2.7 billion on Bitcoin and 884 million on Tron.
Citing these figures as evidence of criminal Bitcoin use assigns the findings to the wrong cryptocurrency.
What these figures do not support
The sub-one-per-cent value is not a full census of all transactions. The reference quantity is attributed volume, essentially inflows to known, identified services. Unattributed addresses, purely private wallet-to-wallet transfers and illicit addresses not yet identified are not included. The provider explicitly describes the absolute figure as a lower bound and revises its annual values upwards in later reporting rounds. How large this attribution gap is has not been published, so it cannot be claimed to be negligible either.
Nor does it follow that crime is a marginal phenomenon in the crypto space. The same report records an absolute record of at least 154 billion US dollars flowing to illicit addresses in 2025, driven largely by sanctioned state actors.
What holds is this: between “below one per cent of attributed volume” and the claim made in the debate that the vast majority of payments are illicit lies a factor of more than 50. An attribution error of that magnitude has not occurred in any published reporting round.
Sources
Chainalysis: Crypto Crime Reaches Record High in 2025 as Nation-State Sanctions Evasion Moves On-Chain at Scale. Crypto Crime Report 2026, 8 January 2026. chainalysis.com
Griffin, John M. / Mei, Kevin: How Do Crypto Flows Finance Slavery? The Economics of Pig Butchering. Working paper, University of Texas at Austin, version of 12 September 2025. DOI 10.2139/ssrn.4742235
Where this answer comes from
This page summarises findings 1 and 2 from the fact check Die öffentliche Begründung der Reform – vierzehn Behauptungen zur Haltefrist nach § 23 EStG, geprüft an den Primärquellen (Peter Rochel, 2026, 43 pages, 44 sources, CC BY 4.0). The full report, with every reference and caveat, is permanently citable at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21792953. The author is a co-petitioner of petition 201716; the conflict of interest is disclosed in the report.
