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In an exclusive conversation with TheStreet Roundtable , Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik revealed how the company is using AI to map the crypto world at scale — labeling nearly half a billion blockchain wallet addresses across Ethereum , Solana , and Layer 2s.

“We use AI to label addresses, like you said, right? And we have almost half a billion addresses labelled. There's no way you can do that manually. You can't sit down and manually label hundreds of millions of addresses.” Svanevik told host Mehab Qureshi. “So what we do is we have AI agents that do this work. They look at activity on chain, they look at information that's out there in the public domain... and we sort of put all of this information together and we label addresses.”

Nansen was launched in 2020 by Alex Svanevik, a data scientist and blockchain researcher. It was created to bring clarity and transparency to blockchain data through AI-powered wallet labeling and analytics. Since launch, it has become a leading on-chain intelligence platform used by investors, institutions, and regulators worldwide.

That labeling process becomes smarter over time. “If you have labelled 10 addresses and then an 11th address comes in, interacts with those — now it's easier to label the 11.”

Svanevik emphasized that unlike standard block explorers, which only provide raw transaction data, Nansen layers in real intelligence.

“You don't get the labels, or at least not as an extensive label set with an explorer, you just get vanilla transactions,” he said. “Number two, you don’t necessarily get the aggregated insights... if I want to know what are the smart money investors actually investing in, you can’t use an explorer to find that out.”

He likened it to a map, “I think of it as like a Google Earth kind of analogy. You could look at the whole globe far away, or you can zoom into the street level... With a block explorer, it's mostly at the street level. You can't really zoom out.”

On DeFi hacks and fund tracking, Svanevik said Nansen’s AI systems can follow stolen assets across chains. “Every single transaction that's ever taken place on a blockchain, even if it's five years ago or one second ago, is going to be a Nansen... You could monitor the flow of funds, and if they hop from one chain to another, you could still track that.”

He also noted that while most users come for investing and due diligence tools, many use Nansen for compliance, security, and forensic tracking.

“Yes, you can track that, absolutely.” Svanevik said.