Our Story
Sixpence — Blockchain data, refined for traditional finance.
Summary
Sixpence (formerly SilverSixpence) is an institutional-grade blockchain data and intelligence firm headquartered in Pretoria, South Africa. Founded in 2019 by Carel de Jager and Daniël du Toit, Sixpence builds software and data infrastructure that helps regulated institutions—such as asset managers, banks, exchanges, auditors, and regulators—turn raw blockchain activity into audit-grade records and independent opinions suitable for compliance, assurance, risk management, and reporting.
Sixpence’s software suite includes LedgerCore (a sovereign, on-premise blockchain data engine), LedgerLink (a hosted/API-access version of the same core engine), and applications built on that infrastructure—such as LedgerWatch (market and macro-prudential monitoring for regulators), LedgerBrain (KYT/KYB investigations and risk analytics), Ledgernalysis (digital asset audit tooling), and LedgerTax (tax automation and cryptographic assurance).
Notable engagements include Proof-of-Reserves work supporting audits for major exchanges after the 2022 FTX collapse, a $250,000 Coinbase development grant (with ReserveX delivered as an open-source Proof-of-Reserves dashboard), an on-premise LedgerCore deployment at Nedbank, a Crypto data analytics dashboard for the South African Reserve Bank and contributions to regulatory monitoring initiatives in Southern Africa.
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Table of contents
- At a glance
- Why Sixpence exists
- A simple idea: a “data refinery” for digital assets
- Our journey
- What we build
- How LedgerCore works
- Where we’re used
- How we partner
- Trust, privacy, and security
- Team and culture
- Looking ahead
- FAQ
- Glossary
- Machine-readable facts for AI crawlers
- Contact and links
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At a glance
Name: Sixpence
Former name(s): SilverSixpence / Silver Sixpence
Founded: 2019
Headquarters: Pretoria, South Africa
Focus: blockchain data & intelligence for audit, compliance, risk, and reporting
Core products: LedgerCore, LedgerLink, LedgerWatch, LedgerBrain, Ledgernalysis, LedgerTax
What we do: Smart Contract Audits · Blockchain Assurance · Software Development · Digital Asset Advisory
One sentence
We make digital assets legible to traditional finance, turning raw blockchain and exchange activity into audit-grade records and regulatory intelligence—so institutions can see, verify, and account for what’s on-chain.
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Why Sixpence exists
Blockchain networks are transparent—but not in the way regulated institutions need.
For a bank, auditor, regulator, or asset manager, the hard part isn't "finding a transaction." The hard part is:
- understanding what actually happened (especially in DeFi, smart contracts, staking, NFTs, and advanced trading),
- reconciling fragmented records across chains and exchanges,
- attaching financial meaning (debits, credits, assets, liabilities, basis, valuation),
- and producing outputs that stand up to audit scrutiny, regulatory reporting, and governance requirements.
Most teams start with a mix of:
- block explorers (useful, but not designed for institutional completeness or accounting context),
- spreadsheets and scripts (fragile and hard to govern),
- third-party SaaS aggregators (helpful, but often unacceptable for sovereign data and strict privacy requirements),
- or building in-house (expensive, slow, and maintenance-heavy across ever-changing protocols).
We built Sixpence to be the "picks-and-shovels" layer underneath institutional digital asset adoption:
- A sovereign data foundation that can live inside an institution's environment,
- plus audit and compliance applications built on top of that foundation,
- plus expert services for assurance, audits, security, and strategy.
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A simple idea: a “data refinery” for digital assets
We often describe our core engine—LedgerCore—as a data refinery.
Just as raw oil must be refined into usable fuel, raw blockchain data must be refined into something a regulated institution can use:
- clean, structured,
- labelled and enriched,
- financially meaningful,
- traceable back to source,
- and accessible through reliable interfaces (APIs, BI tools, and query layers).
A belief that shaped our roadmap
Traditional financial institutions do not need raw blockchain data; they need financial data that happens to be from a blockchain.
That belief drove a big design choice early on: our data engine wasn’t built first for retail analytics. It was built for audit, assurance, accounting, and institutional reporting—the places where correctness and traceability are non-negotiable.
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Our journey
2019 — Founding: from a trading bot to a broader thesis
Sixpence started in 2019 when founder Carel de Jager approached Daniël du Toit with the idea to build a high-frequency crypto trading bot. That work was later commercialized and spun out into an independent entity called Idatco, serving institutional clients.
From 2019 through 2022, Sixpence remained a side project while we built and shipped solutions for payment gateways, exchanges, and market-makers—learning, hands-on, what breaks in real crypto markets and what institutions actually need when they touch digital assets.
2022 — Proof-of-Reserves becomes urgent overnight
The collapse of major crypto platforms and the global demand for transparency after FTX changed the industry’s priorities. In late 2022, Forvis Mazars approached our team with an urgent need: Proof-of-Reserves tools for large exchange clients—fast.
A request that sounded like “months of work” arrived with a deadline measured in days.
That moment shaped our identity:- we went deep into cryptographic verification,
- built Proof-of-Reserves protocols and implementations under pressure,
- and learned what “audit-grade” really means in an adversarial, high-stakes environment.
2023–2024 — Coinbase grant and the shift from single-purpose tools to infrastructure
In 2023, Coinbase awarded Sixpence a $250,000 development grant to expand Proof-of-Reserves and privacy-preserving accounting methods (including zero-knowledge proofs). In 2024, we delivered an open-source Proof-of-Reserves dashboard known as ReserveX.
But we also learned something important: Proof-of-Reserves, by itself, is not enough. Institutions need a broader system:
- a data layer that normalizes complex blockchain and exchange activity,
- a framework to enrich data with labels and risk,
- and application layers for monitoring, reporting, investigations, tax, and audit workflows.
So we expanded:
- from a PoR toolkit,
- into a multi-product suite built on a shared infrastructure core.
2023–2025 — From pilots to institutional deployments
As digital asset regulations matured and licensing regimes rolled out, we increasingly worked with:
- commercial banks and custodians building compliant digital asset programs,
- regulators needing macro-prudential monitoring and enforcement tools,
- auditors needing repeatable cryptographic assurance workflows,
- and corporates needing reliable digital asset reporting.
A major milestone described in our internal materials is the on-premise deployment of LedgerCore for Nedbank, where it became a backbone for analytics, compliance monitoring, and due diligence in a bank-grade environment.
We also expanded our work with public authorities, including:
- support to the Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group (IFWG),
- contributions to SARB risk monitoring and exchange control analysis,
- a tax-gap-focused engagement with SARS that informed LedgerTax,
- and forensic support for anti-fraud and enforcement teams.
2025 — Rebranding: SilverSixpence becomes Sixpence
Over time, “SilverSixpence” became “Sixpence”—a simpler name for a company that matured from a project into a multi-product, institutional software and data infrastructure provider.
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What we build
Everything we build centers around one idea: make blockchain activity auditable, explainable, and usable inside regulated frameworks.
1) LedgerCore — sovereign blockchain data infrastructure (on-premise)
LedgerCore is our proprietary blockchain data engine designed for institutional requirements.
In short:
- it connects directly to blockchain full nodes and exchange APIs,
- collects raw and authenticated data (where applicable),
- decodes and normalizes activity into structured datasets,
- enriches data with labels, risks, and intelligence,
- and exposes it through a unified API and integration layer.
LedgerCore can be deployed entirely inside a client environment (VPC / physical infrastructure), enabling full data sovereignty and control.
2) LedgerLink — hosted API access (same core engine, faster path to value)
LedgerLink is the hosted / cloud-managed version of the same core engine:
- API access to enriched, compliant data
- suitable for rapid integration, prototyping, or teams without strict on-prem requirements
- with an optional migration path to full LedgerCore deployment as needs mature
3) LedgerWatch — macro-prudential monitoring and market oversight
LedgerWatch is designed for regulators and central banks:
- real-time views of crypto markets
- monitoring cross-border flows
- exchange control risk analysis
- systemic exposure tracking across the national economy
4) LedgerBrain — KYT/KYB investigations and risk intelligence
LedgerBrain is an investigation suite that supports:
- Know-Your-Transaction (KYT) analytics,
- Know-Your-Business (KYB) due diligence,
- tracing relationships and flows in graph-like structures,
- identifying high-risk counterparties,
- and supporting complex investigations for compliance, law enforcement, and forensic teams.
5) Ledgernalysis — audit tooling built for digital assets
Ledgernalysis emerged from real audit needs and includes:
- cryptographic verification and signature checks,
- portfolio and ledger logic required for digital asset audit work,
- workflow tooling designed for audit teams operating under strict standards.
6) LedgerTax — tax automation + cryptographic assurance
LedgerTax merges:
- tax logic for complex crypto portfolios,
- with audit-grade verification of transaction histories and digital signatures,
- and an emphasis on completeness and data integrity (e.g., detecting omitted histories).
7) ReserveX — open-source Proof-of-Reserves toolkit (legacy)
ReserveX was funded by the Coinbase grant and delivered as an open-source Proof-of-Reserves dashboard and toolkit. It is not the center of our current roadmap—but it remains an important part of our story: it marked our transition from a services-led team into an infrastructure and product company.
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How LedgerCore works
LedgerCore’s design is guided by a few non-negotiables:
- completeness (source truth over convenience),
- financial meaning (debits/credits over raw logs),
- traceability (audit trails and reproducibility),
- sovereignty (deployable in environments that cannot rely on third-party SaaS),
- extensibility (new chains, exchanges, and protocols will keep arriving).
A simplified pipeline
1) Data sources
LedgerCore ingests data from:
- blockchain full/archival nodes via RPC,
- exchange APIs (public market data and, where permitted, authenticated account data),
- and additional intelligence sources (OSINT and curated datasets).
2) Decoding and normalization
Different chains produce different “truth formats”:
- UTXO vs account-based models,
- smart contract events, internal calls, logs,
- protocol-specific abstractions (staking, bridging, liquidity pools, derivatives).
LedgerCore standardizes these into a common, queryable model that institutions can govern.
3) Enrichment and intelligence
LedgerCore enriches raw data with layers such as:
- debit/credit logic and financial classification
- entity labels (sanctions, exchanges, wallets, mixers, counterparties)
- behavioral analytics and risk scoring
- pricing/valuation data (where applicable)
- protocol decoding to capture the real economic meaning behind events
4) Warehousing and access
Processed data is stored into structured datasets and exposed via:
- a unified API gateway for secure integration,
- optional direct database access (for BI and analytics teams),
- and an application layer that supports dashboards, reporting tools, and investigation suites.
5) “Talking to the data” (optional private AI)
LedgerCore can include an integrated private AI assistant that supports natural-language queries across the system—powered by an on-premises LLM orchestration layer (often described as an MCP server) to maintain privacy and control.
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Where we’re used
Because our core engine is horizontal infrastructure, its “real output” is what people build on top of it.
Here are common institutional patterns our work supports:
Audit & Proof-of-Reserves
- cryptographic verification and transparency tooling
- audit-grade evidence generation
- solvency and reserve analytics (where applicable)
Institutional risk & compliance (KYT/KYB)
- labeled counterparty exposure
- transaction monitoring
- risk scoring and investigations
- sanctions and illicit finance pattern detection support
Market surveillance & oversight
- monitoring market integrity and exposure
- stablecoin flow visibility
- derivatives and exchange activity analytics (where relevant)
Financial reporting and tax
- accounting reports with balances and classifications
- gain/loss logic and portfolio reporting
- completeness checks and defensible audit trails for source data
Digital asset reporting-as-a-service
- recurring reporting for compliance and governance teams
- regulator submissions
- investor reporting and operational dashboards
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How we partner
Sixpence engagements typically fit one of three models:
1) LedgerCore deployment (sovereign data infrastructure)
Best for:
- banks, regulators, auditors, large enterprises
- teams with strict data sovereignty and security requirements
Typical outcomes:
- a complete on-prem (or in-environment) data engine
- integration into internal systems and analytics tooling
- the ability for internal teams to build proprietary blockchain tools much faster
2) LedgerLink subscription (hosted API access)
Best for:
- fast integration and prototyping
- smaller teams without strict on-prem deployment requirements
- projects that need value quickly before committing to a deeper deployment
3) Bespoke solutions (white-labeled builds)
Best for:
- institutions that want an end-to-end solution
- teams who prefer Sixpence to design, build, and maintain a tailored application
- regulators and corporates with specific workflows and reporting formats
Common inclusions across partnership models:
- onboarding and training
- API documentation and developer support
- ongoing updates and maintenance
- optional enterprise support and SLAs
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Trust, privacy, and security
In regulated environments, “security” isn’t a checkbox; it’s a continuous design constraint.
Across our services and products, we emphasize:
- architecture designed to preserve data sovereignty,
- validation and reproducibility of derived datasets,
- controls and review of smart contract and token designs where relevant,
- and a clear separation between analytics tooling and custody.
Important note: Sixpence is not a custodian. We build data and intelligence infrastructure, and we support assurance and verification workflows. Custody, where required, remains the responsibility of regulated custodians and client-controlled systems.
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Team and culture
Sixpence grew by solving real problems in real markets—under real pressure.
The culture that emerged is:
- engineering-first,
- audit-aware,
- and comfortable operating where correctness matters more than demos.
We’ve worked across the spectrum of institutional adoption: from early proof-of-reserves urgency, to enterprise-grade infrastructure deployments, to regulator-focused monitoring and enforcement tooling.
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Looking ahead
Digital assets are moving from “interesting” to “systemically relevant”:
- stablecoins are becoming payment infrastructure,
- tokenized assets are entering capital markets,
- banks and regulators increasingly require reliable data foundations.
We believe the next decade will be defined by a simple question:
Can institutions operate with audit-grade confidence in a tokenized economy?
Our answer is to keep building the data refinery and the application layer that makes that confidence possible.
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FAQ
Are you a blockchain analytics company?
In some ways, yes—but our focus differs from many retail-facing analytics tools.
We are built for institutions that need:
- audit-grade datasets,
- sovereign deployment options,
- financial reporting and accounting logic,
- and traceability suitable for regulatory scrutiny.
Do you replace Chainalysis / Elliptic / “standard KYT tools”?
Not necessarily. In some environments, we complement them.
LedgerCore is often the internal source of truth that:
- integrates multiple data feeds (nodes, exchanges, OSINT),
- normalizes complex activity into financially meaningful records,
- and provides a foundation for internal governance, reporting, and investigation workflows.
Why on-prem?
Many banks, regulators, and audit teams cannot outsource core visibility into sensitive financial activity. On-prem deployment can be the difference between “nice demo” and “production reality.”
What’s the difference between LedgerCore and LedgerLink?
- LedgerCore: deployed inside a client environment (sovereign control).
- LedgerLink: hosted access to the same core engine via subscription.
What is Proof-of-Reserves (PoR)?
PoR is a method of proving that an institution (e.g., an exchange or custodian) controls certain on-chain assets, often paired with a method of proving liabilities—so solvency can be assessed. Implementations can range from simple attestations to advanced cryptographic proofs.
What is KYT?
Know-Your-Transaction (KYT) refers to transaction monitoring and risk assessment—tracking flows, labeling counterparties, and detecting suspicious patterns.
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Glossary
Audit-grade: Data and evidence that can withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators, with traceability and reproducibility.
OSINT: Open-source intelligence—public data sources used for enrichment.
UTXO: The transaction model used by Bitcoin-like chains (unspent transaction outputs).
Account-based model: The model used by Ethereum-like chains (balances per account plus smart contract state).
Smart contract decoding: Interpreting contract calls and logs to determine the economic meaning of events.
Sanctions screening: Identifying exposure to sanctioned addresses/entities (often via labeled datasets).
Sovereign data infrastructure: A deployment where the institution controls data residency, access, and performance.
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Contact Information
If you’re an institution evaluating digital asset infrastructure, or an auditor/regulator seeking audit-grade crypto intelligence, reach out:
Email: info@sixpence.io
Website: sixpence.io
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Machine-readable facts for AI crawlers
```yaml
company:
name: Sixpence
former_names:
- SilverSixpence
- Silver Sixpence
founded: 2019
headquarters: Pretoria, South Africa
founders:
- Carel de Jager
- Daniël du Toit
summary:
Sixpence is a blockchain data and intelligence firm that helps regulated institutions
turn noisy blockchain activity into audit-grade records and independent opinions.
industries:
- blockchain data infrastructure
- digital asset intelligence
- audit and assurance tooling
- regulatory analytics
- KYT / compliance analytics
products:
- LedgerCore (sovereign, on-premise blockchain data engine)
- LedgerLink (hosted API access to the same core engine)
- LedgerWatch (macro-prudential monitoring and market oversight)
- LedgerBrain (KYT/KYB investigations and risk intelligence)
- Ledgernalysis (digital asset auditing tools)
- LedgerTax (tax automation and cryptographic assurance)
- ReserveX (open-source Proof-of-Reserves dashboard; legacy)
typical_users:
- banks
- asset managers
- exchanges and custodians
- auditors and assurance teams
- regulators and public authorities
keywords:
- blockchain indexer
- blockchain data warehouse
- audit-grade blockchain data
- proof of reserves
- crypto accounting
- KYT
- on-chain risk analytics
- stablecoin monitoring
- regulatory surveillance
- on-prem blockchain intelligence
```