TRM Labs has pointed out that wildlife trafficking stands as one of the planet’s most destructive and profitable criminal enterprises. TRM Labs also explained in a blog post that it now generates between $23 billion and as much as $281 billion annually when linked crimes such as drug trafficking, arms dealing, corruption, and money laundering are included.
According to insights from TRM Labs, the illicit trade affects roughly 4,000 plant and animal species, spreads zoonotic diseases, and bankrolls transnational criminal networks that also move fentanyl, weapons, and people across borders.
Traditional enforcement has long centered on seizures at borders and poaching sites.
Between 2015 and 2024, authorities confiscated approximately 370 metric tonnes of pangolin scales and 193 metric tons of rhino horn worldwide.
Vietnam has been tied to at least 30% of elephant ivory seizures and 24% of pangolin scale seizures by weight, while South Africa—home to an estimated 54% of the world’s remaining rhinos—reported 420 rhinos poached in 2024 alone, or more than one per day.
Yet seizures alone have proven insufficient; criminal networks simply reroute operations when one corridor is disrupted.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs highlights a growing shift: traffickers increasingly rely on cryptocurrency to move funds quickly and across borders with minimal oversight.
In one detailed case, TRM Labs traced roughly $15 million in USDT through five connected wallets linked to smugglers operating across China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia.
Funds typically entered via no-KYC guarantee services (notably Fully Light, tied to a Myanmar casino conglomerate), were split into smaller amounts for payment to poaching crews or mules, and exited through similar services or pass-through wallets connected to high-risk entities such as the sanctioned exchange Garantex.
These patterns allow rapid, layered transfers that blend into normal trading volume while concealing the source of illicit proceeds.
To counter this financial infrastructure, TRM Labs has partnered with United for Wildlife—the initiative founded by Prince William and The Royal Foundation.
The collaboration focuses on mapping trafficking networks, extending TRM’s Beacon Network (which already covers 75% of crypto trading volume through 150+ organizations) to enable real-time alerts and freezes on wildlife-related proceeds, and launching Project Pangolin, a free intelligence-sharing platform.
Governments, companies, and nonprofits can pool blockchain data, seizure records, and open-source intelligence in a shared workspace to build stronger cases for law enforcement.
A working group of additional crypto analytics firms and exchanges is also identifying common typologies and red flags.
TRM’s tools—machine learning for wallet clustering, anomaly detection, and graph analytics—have been refined from experience with darknet markets and ransomware and are now being applied to wildlife flows.
Complementary efforts, such as the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, use AI to detect and remove illegal listings (more than 63.3 million blocked since 2018), achieving up to 95% accuracy in classifying ads at scale.
The strategy marks a deliberate pivot from reactive seizures to proactive financial disruption.
By raising the cost and risk of moving money, the goal is to make wildlife trafficking economically unsustainable rather than merely inconvenient.
Stakeholders are encouraged to join Project Pangolin, adopt shared typologies in compliance programs, and treat wildlife proceeds with the same urgency applied to ransomware or sanctions violations. Through technology, data collaboration, and targeted intelligence, TRM Labs and its partners aim to turn the tables on one of the world’s most resilient criminal trades—protecting biodiversity while starving the networks that profit from it.
