Bigg Digital Assets (BIGG.C) has added Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to the growing stable of cryptocurrencies supported by their QLUE platform.

Regardless of how we might feel about Bitcoin Cash, it’s a source of transactions that investigators and financial institutions need to consider when considering liabilities and risk. Blockchain Intelligence Group’s QLUE has been tapped to handle those risks by giving financial institutions and law enforcement agencies alike the ability to trace transactions on the blockchain.

“QLUE is being touted by the industry as having the most user friendly interface which makes it a lot easier to onboard new law enforcement or compliance officers. The addition of BCH makes QLUE even more valuable to our current and prospective customers for investigations thus expanding our revenue potential and market share of the crypto forensics market globally,” said Lance Morginn, BIGG’s president.

Not to put too fine a bow on it, but Bitcoin Cash was born out of internecine squabbles and disagreements on ideology and functionality. Most of the Bitcoin’s Bastards series of altcoins are like that—spoiled developers not being recognized at the company Christmas Party and decided to take their ball (or their coin) and go home. Hence, we have the 2017 hard fork which brought about Bitcoin Cash, which is Roger Ver’s coin.

Given the fact that he can’t go an entire week without sniping at Bitcoin, he might still be a bit sore about it.

But we digress.

First, QLUE stands for Qualitative Law Enforcement Unified Edge, and it’s a program used by law enforcement, banks, and other financial institutions to provide security for blockchain investigations and do due diligence with deeper forensic reach. Each point along the blockchain is represented by a series of numbers, and what Bigg does is trace the path a particular coin takes along through this highway of numbers.

At first, the numbers don’t mean much without a cipher. One series of numbers representing a bitcoin interacts either as a whole or in part with another series of numbers representing a wallet or an exchange, and then rebounds out to interact without another series of numbers. On the average, most numbers aren’t worth following. But if a large amount of Bitcoin either enters or leaves an unknown wallet regularly, or even better, only leaves every so often and is rarely replenished, especially if the unknown wallet is known to have a lot of cryptocurrency, it’s noteworthy.

The second case is significant to whale-watchers, or those in search of large currency fluctuations, because that’s one way market trends could potentially be predicted. The first—with the regular currency traffic in and out of unknown wallets—could be and is regularly used to track some of the more nefarious aspects of Bitcoin traffic.

It’s how the FBI brings down child porn rings on the deep web, and how we know Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are potentially being used to fund our enemies. Qlue, in this case, represents a significant game of technical connect-the-dots, which allows for the facilitation of an investigation. The results end up being saved on file for regulators, or can be requested for a subpoena or be provided in evidence in court.

QLUE also supports BTC, ethereum, litecoin and ERC20 tokens.

—Joseph Morton