A Mechanism-Based Evolutionary Taxonomy of Money Laundering: From Traditional Finance to Zero-Knowledge Cryptography

Existing taxonomies of money laundering classify schemes by instrument, sector, or jurisdictional context, producing catalogues that become obsolete as technology evolves. We propose a mechanism-based evolutionary taxonomy: nine fundamental mechanisms that underlie all known laundering strategies, each expressed in four evolutionary versions — traditional, non-crypto digital, cryptocurrency, and zero-knowledge cryptographic. The core argument is that mechanisms are invariant across technological substrates: an adversary who understands the mechanism recognizes its instantiation in any future instrument. Validated against 23 enforcement actions totalling over $20 billion in documented cases from 2010 to 2025, with a formal detection surface metric δ(M,v) enabling quantitative comparison across mechanism-version pairs.