Peel Chain

A peel chain is a sequence of transactions in which a small portion of funds is repeatedly split off from a larger amount to gradually move and obscure value across many addresses.

In a peel chain, an actor sends the bulk of a balance to a fresh change address while peeling a small slice toward an exchange or another service, repeating the pattern dozens of times. Each hop looks unremarkable in isolation, but the chain steadily distances funds from their origin and complicates tracing. Detecting it requires following value across many hops rather than one. Our multi-hop fund-flow tracing walks these chains automatically, and the exposure breakdown by category and by hop count shows how many peels separate a deposit from a known illicit source, feeding the address risk-score.