Training the Front Lines of Blockchain Intelligence

I lead TRM Academy, the training and certification arm of TRM Labs. Our mission is simple to say and hard to do well: educate and empower people to protect the blockchain ecosystem.

TRM Labs builds blockchain intelligence tools that help law enforcement, regulators, and financial institutions detect fraud and financial crime, accelerate investigations, and protect victims at scale.

But tools alone aren’t enough. If the people on the front lines don’t know how to use those tools, or don’t understand how crypto crime actually works, the most sophisticated platform in the world won’t change outcomes.

TRM Academy exists to close that gap.

We train the investigators who trace ransomware payments and child exploitation proceeds across chains. We train compliance teams who decide whether a transaction is a false positive or a real sanctions evasion risk. We train regulators and tax authorities who have to make sense of new rails without shutting down innovation.

When we do our job well, more victims are protected, more cases are brought to completion, and more institutions can safely participate in the digital asset economy. When we fall short, the cost is measured in people harmed and public trust eroded. That’s the bar we hold ourselves to.

What we’re building (and what’s at stake)

TRM Academy is an online, self-service suite of content that covers both TRM products and the broader crypto ecosystem: blockchain fundamentals, digital asset markets, crypto tax, seizures, compliance, and more. We deliver:

• Self-paced, on-demand courses and certifications you can take from anywhere
• Virtual and in-person instructor-led programs designed for teams that need to go deep, fast
• Role-based learning pathways for investigators, compliance officers, regulators, tax specialists, and defense analysts

Our certification lineup includes offerings like Crypto Fundamentals, Certified Investigator, Advanced Crypto Investigator, Crypto Compliance Specialist, Digital Forensics and Cryptocurrencies, Crypto Seizure Specialist, and Crypto Tax Specialist, alongside product-focused training on TRM Forensics and related tools.

Every course is built to stand up to scrutiny from courts, regulators, and internal audits — not just to “check the box.”

Looking ahead, our 2026 focus is on three themes:

• AI-powered investigations as everyday reality. We’re building training for “glass-box” AI — co‑pilots that accelerate pattern detection while preserving explainability and audit trails, so teams can defend how AI was used in an investigation or review.
• Behavioral intelligence as the common language. Instead of chasing individual addresses, we teach behavioral signatures and typologies — cross‑chain laundering, ransomware cash‑outs, vendor-shop off‑ramps — and how to prove a narrative, not just draw a graph.
• Credentialed capacity at global scale. Role-based credentials, recertification, and localization (Spanish, French, German, and beyond) so teams can learn in their working language and stay current as threats evolve.

What’s at stake is whether institutions worldwide can keep pace with multi-chain, AI‑enabled crime without defaulting to “no” on innovation. Our job is to build the learning infrastructure that makes “yes, safely” possible.

How the TRM Academy team operates

TRM Academy is intentionally product-adjacent and growth-minded, not a “nice-to-have” support function.

We sit at the intersection of:

• Product excellence. We own the learning stack around TRM products — LMS, learning paths, certifications, support docs, and in‑product education surfaces.
• Go-to-market and revenue. TRM Academy is explicitly framed as a training-led growth lever, mapped to TRM’s pillars and OKRs, with its own monetization strategy across certifications, subscriptions, live training, and professional development packs.
• Customer success and adoption. Our charter is to deliver integrated learning experiences that drive real outcomes: faster ramp, higher adoption, better investigations, and stronger compliance programs.

Practically, that means:

• We design scenario-based labs and case workups, not just feature demos — training that moves learners from “I can follow this” to “I can do this on my own case.”
• We update curriculum continuously as new product features ship, new typologies emerge, and regulations evolve — often weekly, not annually.
• We build with practitioners, not in a vacuum. Our instructors and content designers come from law enforcement, compliance, tax, and digital forensics backgrounds — and we treat their field experience as a core asset.
• We measure what matters: learning engagement, completion and pass rates, learner satisfaction, and, increasingly, the signals that correlate with product usage, better cases, and program success.

If you join this team, you won’t just be “making courses.” You’ll be shaping how the market learns to investigate and govern crypto risk — and tying that directly to TRM’s product and brand.

My leadership perspective

Before TRM, I spent over a decade at the FBI, most of it on the Virtual Currency Evolving Threats (VCET) Team. I worked on blockchain intelligence analysis, investigative support, tool development, seizure and forfeiture best practices, and training thousands of people on money laundering and cryptocurrency.

That experience shapes how I lead TRM Academy in a few specific ways:

• Rigor over theatrics. Training has to hold up in courtrooms, regulatory exams, and internal reviews. I care less about whether a module looks flashy and more about whether a supervisor would trust it as evidence of competence.
• Real cases over abstract theory. People learn best when content mirrors the investigations and reviews they actually run. We anchor our curriculum in realistic scenarios, with clear narratives, decision points, and tradeoffs — because that’s what teams are accountable for in the real world.
• Training as a growth product. I see Academy as a growth and credibility engine: we train the market’s practitioners, certify its experts, and power training-led GTM plays that make TRM the default standard for crypto investigations and compliance.
• Depth as the main unlock. Our 2026 focus is on depth — persona‑, segment‑, and region‑specific journeys with demonstrable impact — because that’s what turns “we heard of TRM” into “we default to TRM and its credentials when it matters.”

If we do this right, TRM Academy becomes the place serious practitioners go to learn, to certify, and to stay current — and the stories they tell about their work become proof that TRM’s mission to build to protect civilization is more than a slogan.

Who thrives on the TRM Academy team (and who doesn’t)

People who thrive on this team tend to share a few traits:

• Outcome-obsessed educators. You care less about content volume and more about what changes in a learner’s investigations, reviews, or decisions after they train with us.
• Bridge-builders between disciplines. You’re comfortable translating between product, data science, law enforcement, compliance, and marketing — and you enjoy that translation work.
• System thinkers. You see a course as one node in a larger system: onboarding, certification, re‑cert, in‑product nudges, customer success, sales motions, and public‑private collaboration.
• Comfort with ambiguity and speed. Threats evolve, tools change, regulators update guidance. You can build structure without waiting for perfect information, and you’re willing to iterate in public.

People who struggle here usually:

• Want to teach in isolation — delivering lectures without engaging with product, GTM, or customer outcomes.
• Treat training as a one-and-done event — not a lifecycle with recertification, embedded microlearning, and continuous improvement.
• Are allergic to measurement, or uncomfortable tying their work to metrics like adoption, performance, or brand impact.

This is not a fit if you’re looking for a calm, purely academic environment. It is a fit if you want to stand at the point where complex technology, real-world harm, and public trust intersect — and are willing to be judged on the quality and impact of what learners can do after they leave your course.

Why being part of the TRM Academy team might be right for you

If you’ve spent your career building training or education programs around complex, high‑stakes domains — crypto, financial crime, digital forensics, national security, heavy regulation — you know how rare it is to find a place where the stakes, the tools, and the mandate to educate at scale all line up.

At TRM Academy, you can:

• Help define how teams worldwide learn to use AI responsibly in investigations and compliance, not just how to click an “AI” button.
• Shape the behavioral intelligence and typology language that law enforcement, regulators, and FIs use to describe and disrupt crypto crime.
• Build credentials and pathways that become a currency of trust in the ecosystem — signals that an individual or team is ready to handle real responsibility.

You’ll work with people who have run cases, defended decisions, written policies, and sat across the table from agencies and institutions trying to get this right. And you’ll have the chance to turn that collective experience into something scalable and durable: a learning ecosystem that raises the bar for the entire space.

If you’re looking for a mission where your work directly influences whether we protect more people than we lose in the next chapter of the crypto story, this is one of those missions.

Sound like the kind of work you want to do? Review our open roles and apply at trmlabs.com/careers.