Is the Chainalysis free sanctions screening API still available?

Not verifiably, as of 7 November 2026. Chainalysis's deprecation notice covers the on-chain Sanctions Oracle (last updated 18 March 2026, no further updates). The 2022 landing page for the free tools now resolves to the paid Address Screening product, and the free API's documentation host did not respond to our read. Check Chainalysis's own documentation before building on it; the sanctions-list half of that job is what CompliAPI's free tier does.

Does CompliAPI detect indirect exposure like Chainalysis?

No. CompliAPI matches an address exactly against the identifiers published on sanctions, crime and risk lists. It does not trace transaction flows, cluster addresses or score how close an address sits to illicit funds. The one exposure-shaped dataset it carries, the Tornado Cash association lists, is labelled list_type risk, records addresses that themselves deposited into or relayed for the mixer, and attaches the evidencing transaction to every match.

Can I use CompliAPI and Chainalysis together?

Yes, and the two answer different questions. A direct list check before value moves is deterministic, cheap enough to run on every transaction and traceable to an official record; a risk score adds indirect-exposure depth where your risk assessment calls for it. Teams that need both typically run the list check inline and the analytics platform for risk-based due diligence.

Which sanctions lists does CompliAPI check for a wallet address?

Every enabled list in one request: the US OFAC SDN and Consolidated (non-SDN) lists, the EU consolidated financial sanctions list, the UK Sanctions List, Swiss SECO, the UN Security Council Consolidated List, Canada's and Australia's consolidated lists, the French Trésor register, Japan MOF, Israel NBCTF seizure orders and FBI-attributed Lazarus Group addresses, plus the Ransomwhere crime list and the Tornado Cash risk lists. Each match names its list and list type and links the official record, and the lists filter narrows a call to the lists you choose.

CompliAPI vs Chainalysis for Sanctions Screening

Comparing two approaches to crypto sanctions screening

Chainalysis and CompliAPI are different products that overlap on one question: is this address on a sanctions list? Chainalysis Address Screening answers it inside a risk score, with direct and indirect exposure across categories such as sanctions, scams and darknet markets. CompliAPI answers only that question, as an exact match against the published sanctions, crime and risk lists, with the official source record attached to every hit. If you arrived here looking for Chainalysis's free sanctions screening tools: the on-chain oracle is deprecated (Chainalysis's notice is dated 18 March 2026), and the free-tools landing page now redirects to the paid product. The rest of this post compares the two on sanctions screening alone: what each screens, how current the data is, what a call looks like, and what it costs to start. Where Chainalysis does more, it says so.

Every Chainalysis statement below was read from chainalysis.com on 7 November 2026 and is linked; nothing is taken from third-party reviews. Every CompliAPI statement maps to a documented endpoint.

What each product screens

	Chainalysis Address Screening	CompliAPI
Input	A wallet address ("network agnostic" exposure assessment)	A wallet address or ENS name; also emails, websites, government IDs, names, vessels, aircraft and country codes, each on its own endpoint
Data behind a result	"Blockchain risk data" covering "sanctioned, scam, darknet markets, and more", with "direct and indirect exposures for wallets and liquidity pools"	The published lists: OFAC SDN and Consolidated, EU, UK, Swiss SECO, UN Security Council, Canada, Australia DFAT, French Trésor, Japan MOF, Israel NBCTF, FBI Lazarus addresses, plus the Ransomwhere crime list and the Tornado Cash risk lists
What comes back	"Severity risk scores based on customizable settings", exposure and counterparty analysis	Two booleans, `sanctioned` (a sanctions-list hit only) and `flagged` (any hit), and for each match the list, its `list_type` (sanctions, crime or risk), the designated party's metadata and a `source_url` to the official record
Indirect exposure	Yes: direct and indirect exposure, counterparty analysis	No. An address one hop from a listed one is not listed and screens clear
Continuous checks	"Continuously monitor addresses" with "automated alerts whenever an entity's risk score changes"	Monitored entities on paid plans: a signed webhook or email when a stored address is listed, delisted or relisted

The Chainalysis cells quote its Address Screening page and its wallet-screening glossary entry, which defines wallet screening as "checking a cryptocurrency wallet address against blockchain risk data to assess its exposure to illicit activity" and names "OFAC-, EU-, or UN-sanctioned wallets" among what it covers; it does not list the feeds behind that. The CompliAPI column is the data-source registry, where every list carries its publisher, refresh cadence, current entity count and a download. As of 7 November 2026 the registry holds about 1,070 addresses on the OFAC SDN list and roughly 86,000 on-chain addresses across all lists (the public /api/v1/stats feed).

The difference in the "what comes back" row is the whole comparison in miniature. A risk score is a model's opinion about an address, tunable by policy and useful for risk-based due diligence. A list match is a fact about the public record, which is the thing a sanctions prohibition actually attaches to. CompliAPI returns no score at all, and says so on its wallet screening API page, because a verdict you cannot trace to a published record is one you would have to defend on someone else's model.

How current the lists are

CompliAPI polls Treasury's publication stream every 15 minutes and re-ingests both OFAC files when a new publication appears, and every screening response carries list_versions: per list, the last successful refresh, and for OFAC the publication id and the time the copy was last confirmed current. The other lists refresh on their publishers' cadence, shown per list in the registry. Delisted entries are kept and published on the delisted page rather than silently dropped.

Chainalysis's product page describes "continuous monitoring" and alerts "whenever an entity's risk score changes"; it does not publish a list-refresh interval, so none is stated here.

The deprecated oracle is the cautionary example for any sanctions check that lives on-chain. Chainalysis's oracle documentation now opens with the notice that it "is no longer supported or maintained", that "the smart contract cannot be removed from the blockchain and may remain queryable, but Chainalysis will not add new sanctioned addresses or provide further updates", and that it "is not recommended for new integrations or production sanctions screening", with the last update on 18 March 2026. A contract that stopped updating still answers every call. Anything built on it has been screening against a frozen list since March.

The API shape

One CompliAPI request, with a free key, against the Lazarus Group address OFAC published after the Ronin Bridge theft:

curl https://api.compliapi.com/api/v1/screen/crypto/0x098B716B8Aaf21512996dC57EB0615e2383E2f96 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COMPLIAPI_TOKEN"

{
  "value": "0x098b716b8aaf21512996dc57eb0615e2383e2f96",
  "flagged": true,
  "sanctioned": true,
  "matches": [
    {
      "list": "ofac",
      "list_name": "US OFAC SDN",
      "list_type": "sanctions",
      "match": "exact",
      "source_url": "https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=27307",
      "metadata": { "symbol": "ETH", "sdn_name": "LAZARUS GROUP", "programs": "DPRK3" }
    }
  ]
}

The same check runs as a batch of up to 50 mixed identifiers, as MCP tools for AI agents, and, with no account at all, as x402 pay-per-request calls at $0.01 each. The full envelope is in the API documentation.

Chainalysis's page describes Address Screening as available through "an easy-to-use UI and integrated via high-reliability, low-latency APIs for real-time screening", behind a demo request. Its API documentation is not public, and the free sanctions API's documentation host did not respond to our read on 7 November 2026, so no endpoint, header or payload for either is reproduced here. The chainalysis kyt api that also turns up in searches is KYT, Chainalysis's transaction-monitoring product, which is outside this comparison.

Free tier and price floor

CompliAPI publishes its prices on the pricing page. As of November 2026: a free API key with 1,000 requests a month and no card; the Developer plan at $199 a month, or $149 a month billed annually; the Team plan from $249 per seat a month with a three-seat minimum, pooled at 10,000 requests per seat. Paid plans have no trial because the free tier is the trial.

Chainalysis publishes no price for Address Screening; every call to action on the product page is "Request a demo". Its 2022 announcement described the sanctions API and oracle as "free of charge", with API access by requested key and the oracle "deployed on most EVM chains like Ethereum, Avalanche, BSC, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Celo". Today the oracle is deprecated and the free-tools URL resolves to the paid product. If you depend on the free API, confirm its status in Chainalysis's documentation rather than in posts like this one.

Where Chainalysis does more

Chainalysis describes itself as a blockchain data platform. Its products cover investigations and fund tracing across blockchains (Reactor), real-time transaction monitoring (KYT), address screening that scores a wallet's risk exposure, VASP risk profiles, fraud and security products, and data and intelligence feeds (what blockchain intelligence is). CompliAPI does none of that. It does not trace, cluster, attribute or score; it does not monitor transactions. If your obligations or your risk assessment require blockchain analytics, that is platform territory, and no list check substitutes for it.

Who each fits

A direct list check, CompliAPI's job: a DeFi front-end gating wallet connections, a payment or payout flow that must not move value to a listed address, a marketplace releasing escrow, an AI agent screening a counterparty mid-workflow, a compliance team that needs an auditable yes/no with the official record behind it, and anyone who wants to start today with a free key or a $0.01 call rather than a demo.

A risk programme that must see exposure, Chainalysis's job: an exchange with a KYT obligation, an investigations team tracing funds, a risk function that scores counterparties by how close they sit to illicit activity, and any team whose regulator expects indirect-exposure analysis.

The two are complementary rather than competing. Several of the teams that need an analytics platform also run a deterministic list check in front of it, on every transaction, because the strict-liability prohibition is about the published list and the published list is cheap to check. For a one-off lookup, the free SDN search on this site takes an address with no signup and names the list behind every result.