Marcin Zarakowski trained as a lawyer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and moved to Switzerland to work for layer-1 blockchain foundations—first the Lisk Foundation, then BSV, where he became general counsel. His job was to sell blockchain to enterprises and governments, and the objection he kept hitting was the same: what happens when someone loses their keys or has their wallet drained?" In traditional finance there is always someone to call. In decentralized systems, there is no one.
Patrick Prinz grew up in Linz, started in corporate and investment banking at Deutsche Bank and Citi, moved to strategy consulting at PwC Strategy&, and spent several years on the buy side in South Asia, East Africa, and Zurich. He came to digital assets through high-net-worth clients and saw the same contradiction Marcin saw from the infrastructure side: an industry built on libertarian ideals was becoming institutional at speed, and the compliance and incident-response apparatus had not followed.
Together with Roman Bieda, who previously built blockchain-analytic tools at Coinfirm, they founded Recoveris in Zug in 2025. The firm traces stolen crypto, coordinates freezing requests across exchanges and stablecoin issuers in multiple jurisdictions, and runs source-of-funds analysis for financial institutions onboarding digital-asset clients. Half the twenty-five-person team builds product—including an AI model designed to keep pace with criminals who already use AI at every stage of a scam. The other half investigates: a former Argentine prosecutor who set up her country’s crypto task force, a former Guardia di Finanza officer with a decade on darknet markets, and analysts from the investigation departments of large exchanges. Recoveris counts the US Secret Service and Interpol among its users, has a joint distributed-ledger analysis offering with EY, and is a strategic partner of the ICC FraudNet.
In this conversation, Marcin and Patrick walk through the case that broke the ZondaCrypto scandal—a Polish exchange whose CEO went on camera to prove reserves and ended up pleading on live video for the disappeared founder to send back the private keys. They describe the race between investigators and criminals after a theft, where assets move in seconds and mutual legal assistance between countries takes six months. They explain how the choke points work: centralized exchanges with fiat rails, Telegram groups of five hundred compliance officers, and the blacklisting power of stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle. They detail VC-impersonation scams—rigged proof-of-liquidity sessions, CCTV cameras reading seed phrases, and follow-on recovery scams run by the same perpetrators—and explain why criminals have largely abandoned privacy coins in favor of stablecoins.
Both argue that the future of financial intelligence is blockchain intelligence, that Europe needs its own analytic capabilities and euro-denominated stablecoins rather than extending US jurisdictional reach through dollar-denominated tokens, and that the shift from cryptocurrency to tokenized traditional assets is where the real scale—and the real risk—will land.
Recoveris is on X at @RecoverisTeam. Marcin is on LinkedIn; Patrick is on LinkedIn.
Marieke: Welcome to Currency of Power podcast, where we explore how money, technology and geopolitics are reshaping the global order. We speak with the people building, regulating and challenging the new financial infrastructure — from currencies and stablecoins to AI, trade, energy and the competition for technological power. Our goal is to understand how the financial system is changing, and who gains influence as it does. I’m Marieke Flament.
Nicolas: And I’m Nicolas Colin.
Marieke: Today we will deep dive in the fascinating world of law enforcement and on-chain traceability with Marcin Zarakowski and Patrick Prinz, co-founders of Recoveris. Crypto was built and sold as a system of financial sovereignty and irreversible transactions. But when money is stolen, laundered through bridges and mixers, or linked to sanctioned networks, reversibility reappears — through the ability of stablecoin issuers, exchanges, law enforcement and forensic firms to trace, freeze and ultimately return value. And Recoveris works exactly in that new terrain, translating public blockchain data into intelligence that can move private companies and public authorities to act. So what does this tell us about power in the emerging tokenized financial system? Marcin, Patrick, welcome to the show!
Marcin: Thank you very much. Good to see you.
“What happens if a user loses their private keys?”
Marieke: Awesome to have you guys here. Let’s start with the foundation of Recoveris. Like what did you see and what triggered you to actually create Recoveris?
Marcin: I’m happy to start, and I think it stems from my personal experience in the world realm of blockchain digital assets. I’ve been in the blockchain space for nine years now. I used to work for two layer-one blockchain foundations. And what we were initially trying to do was sell blockchain. What do I mean by that? We were talking to different companies—blue chip companies, enterprises, but also the public sector—trying to convince them to utilize this technology, to build certain use cases using DLT.
And one of the obstacles we saw for adoption—or what stifles the adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology, especially among financial institutions—was the question of what happens if a user loses their private keys, if the private keys get stolen, or if access to certain tokenized assets, or even their identity, is compromised. What then?
Using the analogy of somebody forgetting the PIN to their credit card or the login credentials to an online banking, there’s always a possibility to issue a new one. There is somebody you can call. Whereas in decentralized systems, there’s nobody you can call. So that was one of the ten challenges we faced when “selling” blockchain.
And then I started really investigating further what happens if somebody’s crypto is being stolen. And as crypto was getting more and more adopted, these situations were happening more and more often. Some of them were reaching public opinion via different news.
And what I realized is that if you’re a victim of a scam or a fraud or your crypto is being stolen, in principle, to simplify, you have two options. One, you try to trace the assets. Obviously, it requires some skills and tools, so you will not do it alone. You will hire experts for that. You may go to blockchain analytics firms. So you will trace the assets. But what then? You know where they are, but what is the next step?
The other alternative is you go to law enforcement, and you try to file a criminal complaint. Let’s assume for a second that you’re lucky enough that the person you talk to understands what crypto is and how it works. But the first thing they will do—they will need to do the tracing. And I thought this was a huge waste of time.
So our idea was to build a one-stop shop where somebody whose assets were stolen can come, and we can do the investigations, we can trace the assets, and we can also help and coordinate with the recovery. These were the origins of Recoveris. We saw huge demand, unfortunately for the people but fortunately for us, for our services.
From then we built on, and we are not just tracing assets that are stolen and that are moved by the criminals, but we are also tracing backwards to check the origins of the funds. The purpose here was more for source of funds purposes—so whenever assets are to be onboarded in the financial system, certain checks need to be done during the due diligence process. So we can also do the same analysis on the blockchain. The transactions are there. The data is there. We just need to properly document it and analyze that. This is also another growing segment.
And to finish, while doing all this, we realized that in order to scale it up, because the demand was growing, we cannot just hire more world-class experts. A, because it’s just simply not efficient. B, because talent is very scarce—we are competing with leading companies, and we are competing with the public sector. And finally, with the use of AI and AI being used by criminals, we cannot simply have humans analyze transactions of AI agents that can be much faster and much more complex. So we decided to start automating the whole investigative workflow. We started building products that help companies like ours or the users of investigative tools, and we also started training an AI model, which I guess we’ll have time to discuss later.
Patrick: And if I may add, Marieke and Nicolas, I’ve observed over the yeayears—Ime from the financial industry but spent quite a significant time dealing with digital assets for high net worth individuals. I found it very contradictory for a while. There was this initial world of kind of very libertarian thinking, almost anarchistic.
Marcin: Yes.
Patrick: And if you compare it to where we are today—it’s highly institutional. As a matter of fact, I challenge you to name me one layer 1 blockchain that doesn’t have institutions as their main target audience now for growth. So what does that imply? It implies you have to meet the requirements; they have to be an issuer and to be a facilitator as a regulated entity. You have to deal with compliance and AML; you have to deal with incident response, audits, etc. That’s the name of the game today and that’s what we are catering for.
Marieke: That’s super interesting, you both come at it from different angles and what you are saying is that ultimately for adoption to exist, there is a certain set of tools and systems that are actually needed. Before we get into some of your case studies—which I think are absolutely fascinating—I think it’s really interesting also to understand all the different skill sets that you have to have combined across the table. If I understand it correctly, there is a part which is investigation. There is a part which is legal, so you need former law enforcement professionals, and people who are also building a product because you’re talking about a platform. Give us an idea of what makes the make-up of teams at Recoveris, the functions you have to actually make all of that come to life.
Patrick: Marcin, before you go into the details of our team, I just want to give an analogy. I sometimes think about the automobile industry and the change from the combustion engine to EV. It’s not just that the car works slightly differently; the entire supply chain looks different. And here we are looking at a paradigm shift in that technology, the infrastructure that is used to exchange value. That implies that all the stakeholders along the value chain have to adapt the tools they use and processes but also know-how.
Marcin: So today, we are a team of 24, 25 people. And half of that is product. So basically engineers, software developers, and product managers that are working on the tools that we are building in-house to automate the workflow. And also we have an AI expert that is building the model and training the model.
The other half of the team is mostly composed of investigators, and these people come from former law enforcement. We have a former prosecutor from Argentina. She set up the whole crypto task force for the whole country where all the cases were flowing in. We have people from Guardia di Finanza, who spent more than a dozen years there, working in cybercrime units, taking down some of the largest darknet markets. We have people that used to work for investigation departments of large VASPs. And also we have people like our co-founder Roman, the third one, who used to build blockchain analytic tools. He knows the limitations of those tools, and he knows where they can excel.
But coming back to your question, when you look at a blockchain-based digital asset, you can argue that everything is public; every transaction is stored in a publicly accessible immutable ledger. However, then this would make it pretty easy to trace. So one could argue that everything is indeed traceable. But on the other hand, there are some factors that make it much more complex.
First, a blockchain-based digital asset allows you to transact value peer-to-peer, meaning there is no centralized intermediary that facilitates the payment, unlike traditional financial systems. We don’t have banks, corresponding banks, payment service providers, or credit card issuers. There is nobody to call when the fraud happens, and there is nobody that can stop certain transactions. This really complicates the issue.
The second factor is the speed in which digital asset transactions can be done. The value can be transferred not in a matter of hours or days—it can transfer in a matter of seconds, which is also unprecedented.
And thirdly, almost every case becomes cross-border immediately. Because we can have a victim that is based in Switzerland. We can have criminals, perpetrators, sitting somewhere in one of the scamming compounds in Southeast Asia. And in a matter of seconds, the assets are stolen from the victim and land on multiple different crypto exchanges—starting from Seychelles, the UAE, Europe, the US, and also some other, let’s say, jurisdictions where it’s really hard to enforce anything.
In order to coordinate this, of course, first you need to do the proper tracing, so necessary blockchain analytics tools are required; therefore, staff and people that know how to use them properly are also required. But the element of coordination of these cases, of multiple stakeholders in different jurisdictions speaking different languages and being accustomed to different ways of operating—this is important, and time is of the essence. The most important part for us in every single case is to freeze the assets as soon as possible.
And there is a constant race between law enforcement and the victim on the one hand and the criminals on the other side. They want to steal the assets and off-ramp into fiat as soon as possible. This off-ramping happens only at centralized crypto exchanges that have fiat payment rails. And on the way there, they will use different obfuscation techniques to make our work harder. So there is this race.
So you really indeed need people with different skill sets and different profiles that not only can trace the assets but also are able to coordinate these cases, can understand legal frameworks in different jurisdictions, and also have networks of contacts with some exchanges. I’m not going to reveal the secret—sometimes we reach directly on WhatsApp or on Telegram to law enforcement agents that we used to work on several cases with in another country, or we try to reach out via different channels to compliance people in a crypto exchange asking them for a courtesy freeze, making it plausible with evidence that the assets they’ve just received are really illicit. So all this really requires a different skill set.
