Innovation and Enterprise

An advocate for social responsibility from his early student days, Jonathan Levin (BSc 2012) has since grown his passion into a groundbreaking business devoted to making cryptocurrency safer. Now Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Chainalysis, his platform traces cryptocurrency, providing data to governments, law enforcement, businesses and more in over 70 countries.  

His technology has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and safely grow consumer access to cryptocurrency. Since its founding in 2014, Chainalysis has helped take down the largest child abuse website, track North Korean hackers, disrupt terrorism financing and trace missing funds from crypto money laundering services.  

In honour of this work, Jonathan is the recipient of the 2024 Alumni Award for Innovation and Enterprise. We speak with him about the impact of Bristol values, the pull of entrepreneurship and the importance of ethics in innovation. 

On student life 
Bristol was the best of all worlds with city life, culture and a vibrant student life. I was involved in the Jewish Society, the Bristol Social Enterprise Society, and the Bristol Hub. As a student, I had a very full life of nature, Bristol culture, student organisations, and I learned a thing or two about economics in the middle. 

I got involved in social action and political activism in Bristol, and it shaped the impact I wanted to have on business and society. I dreamed of building things that are both commercial and have a positive impact on the world. I took a lot from that Bristol ethos. 

It started small. I was one of the organisers of the first Bristol Social Enterprise Conference, featuring local business and University speakers. Setting up the Conference helped me realise that there was potential to fulfil that dream. It was early in my journey, but it held some good seeds for the future. 

On innovation 
I got involved in cryptocurrency just after I left Bristol. I did a master's at Oxford, and in 2012, sitting in a pub with my friend Tom, he asked me if we should start trading in Bitcoin, and I said, ‘That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.’ But then I went down the rabbit hole. 

At the time, there were no serious economists paying attention to Bitcoin. I wrote my master's thesis on Bitcoin and the economic incentives that secure it, becoming one of the first academically trained economists to take a proper look at it. I realised we needed a service that understood how and why people use cryptocurrency. I had the idea in 2012, and a couple of years later, built it at Chainalysis. 

On entrepreneurship  
Even before university, I had a great deal of energy for creating. My student life in Bristol was an expression of that. I wasn't necessarily entrepreneurial, but I was interested in building things and bringing people together.  

I did an internship in environmental economics which showed the positive ways we can address world issues through economics, but I wasn't having the impact I felt I could by building something new. I get the most joy out of creating something. If you find the right idea and the right timing, you get a lot more back than the effort that you put in. 

On making crypto safe 
Once in a generation, a technology comes along that will grow exponentially. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to think about what the world is going to look like in the future. With the early adoption of Bitcoin in 2012, I could see that technologies like it would start to control the way that value moves around the world, and that represented a lot of risk to me. 

For cryptocurrency to scale, it was necessary to build trust in the technology and a fair market. At Chainalysis, we care about society and about securing and protecting people in this world of cryptocurrency. To me, that is a mission that I could work on forever as technology evolves and we need to advance our own work to keep pace. 

In building Chainalysis, we've done exactly what I’ve always wanted to do: create a very successful commercial endeavour with real world impact on public safety and national security. I go to work and can feel like we're having a positive impact every day. 

On helping solve high-profile cybercrimes 
It’s amazing to me that Chainalysis has built the technology that powers these investigations. Our customers in law enforcement around the world are using it on cases that we don't know about until we read about them in the newspaper. People have adopted our technology to combat crime at a much greater scale than anything the company could have done alone.  

The case I'm most proud of in terms of human impact has been Welcome to Video, which was the largest child abuse material and distribution website at the time. It was also the case I have been closest to. Using our technology, we could point to the administrator in South Korea and build a list of where the contributors were based internationally, all in 30 seconds.  

More than 20 countries coordinated all the arrests on the same day. We helped see the case through to the arrest of 330 people endangering children's lives around the world. 20 children were freed from very dangerous scenarios. That was it for me. I was ready to hang up my boots at that point, and the impact of that would have been enough. It’s a feeling I'm not sure I'll ever have again. 

On advice for young entrepreneurs 
There are lots of business books out there with lots of good advice. But at the end of the day, you have to be deeply passionate about the business you're in, otherwise you'll never make it.  

You've got to feel the problem that your customer is experiencing firsthand. There's no substitute for that.  

Don’t forget to build human relationships with your business partners and make sure they are people you can trust. These long-term relationships will be hard at times and will continually evolve. Find mechanisms to make sure that they grow and mature over time. Sometimes the human element of business building is the hardest part. 

On the Alumni Award for Innovation and Enterprise 
I'm very happy to receive the award, as I would love to see more social-oriented enterprises with real world impact to be recognised as the model for how businesses should be built. I'm very happy for Bristol to be spotlighting not just innovation and new technology, but also the positive impact they can have on the world.