The payer's address has touched a mixer — can I still accept the funds?
"Touched a mixer" is not an automatic accept/reject answer — it is a judgment that needs evidence and a policy: how many hops away, what share of funds, how long ago, and whether the mixer itself is sanctioned (Tornado Cash-class sanctioned mixers differ from generic privacy tools). The sound approach is three-state: direct dealings with a sanctioned mixer → decline; one-hop exposure or a material share → manual review; distant, small, and old → accept with records kept. OceanAlt's decision API returns exactly these three states — allow / review / decline — with the taint-path evidence attached, so you can set the policy to your own risk appetite.
Why payees screen too
The cost of accepting tainted funds is practical, not moral: when the upstream is stolen or sanctioned money, your address can be frozen by the issuer by association and flagged by exchange risk controls, cutting off your deposit channels overnight. Screening the payer before accepting costs far less than arguing with an exchange compliance desk afterwards.
Regulation is moving toward the payee side too: under the FATF Travel Rule framework, receiving institutions carry identification duties of their own. Individuals and small teams aren't bound the same way — but exchanges risk-score your deposits along exactly these lines.
How to check, what to look at
Paste the payer's address into oceanalt.com/en/check: results distinguish "mixer list hit" (the address is a mixer) from "one-hop taint" (it received funds from a mixer or frozen address), naming the transfer and the source address. For automation, POST oceanalt.com/api/decide returns the three-state decision your code can branch on.
Three questions worth asking in review: what share of the payer's funds does the taint represent? How long ago? Can the payer give a coherent account of the source? Those three answers support a decision better than any black-box score.
The boundary
Taint analysis sees on-chain paths, not off-chain facts; "five hops away" can be innocent circulation or deliberate layering. The tool supplies evidence — the policy and the final call are yours.
Where to start: free address check · API docs · watch an address
Boundary of everything above: a screening "clear" only means no match in the data held, never a safety guarantee; this page is not legal or compliance advice.