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Despite widespread concerns over non-fungible tokens’ vulnerability to money launderers and other financial criminals, just a fraction of funds used to purchase NFTs derive from illicit sources, according to independent research published Tuesday.

NFTs, a type of digital asset that includes digital works of art, memorabilia and other products created and traded mostly on the Ethereum blockchain, have risen dramatically in popularity over the past two years, prompting governments to warn about their potential use in illicit finance and launch investigations into scams and related money-laundering schemes.

But a new report by the London-headquartered blockchain analytics firm Elliptic identified just $8.1 million worth of NFT-related transactions with direct ties to funds derived from cyber thefts, scams, phishing or Ponzi schemes from late 2017 to early 2022—representing only 0.02 percent of overall trading activity.

A further $327 million—just 0.81 percent of the total trading volume—of cryptocurrencies used to purchase NFTs originated from mixers, which are widely used by criminals to obfuscate their sources of funds. Almost half of these funds passed through Tornado Cash, a mixing platform blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury last month for laundering billions on behalf of cyber crooks.

To assess the sector’s exposure to funds originating from illicit and licit activities, Elliptic analyzed 17 million Ethereum-denominated transactions worth more than £40 billion that took place across 28 NFT trading platforms during that period.

For almost any NFT, its page on a marketplace or blockchain explorer can provide a complete history of the sales, transfers, listings and other actions throughout its existence, a feature which is likely to discourage money launderers.

“Links to related transactions and buyers [and] sellers’ wallets can provide further insight into other activity by trading parties,” Elliptic said in the report. “This transparency—which makes NFT tracing easy for investigators—is undesirable for launderers, for which anonymity is key.”