A well documented legal request sent to a major exchange a few years ago could sit unanswered for months with little recourse. That has changed meaningfully at most regulated exchanges, driven by tightening regulatory expectations and compliance teams built specifically to handle this category of request.
Not every platform has moved at the same pace
This shift is real, but it is not uniform. Smaller and less regulated platforms still vary widely in how they respond, and some remain effectively unreachable through a standard legal request. The improvement is concentrated at exchanges operating under established regulatory frameworks.
Why documentation quality still decides the outcome
Faster response times do not remove the need for a well prepared request. A compliance team can move quickly on a request that clearly documents the trace and the legal basis for asking, and slowly, or not at all, on one that does not. The quality of the documentation still matters as much as the underlying trace itself.
This is one of the more encouraging shifts we have observed in the practical value of a completed investigation, even though it changes nothing about what an investigation itself can determine.