on the crypto
The Travel Rule Protocol (TRP), a protocol supported by traditional banks and financial institutions and focused on aligning cryptocurrencies with global anti-money laundering (AML) standards, has released the first version of its application programming interface (API). The group working on the TRP is made up of 25 members and includes Standard Chartered, ING Bank and Fidelity Digital Assets.
The new product aims to offer businesses an easy way to exchange identification data on senders and recipients of crypto transactions as per the requirements of the AML global guarantor, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Concern over the sharing of personally identifiable information between virtual asset service providers (VASPs) has spawned a number of technical solutions from individual cryptographic companies around the world. However, the TRP group is the first to include large retail banks among its founding members.
How TRP works
The TRP uses two simple RESTful APIs, designed to know the ownership of the address and send the requested information to the sender and the recipient of the transaction. The TRP API version is based on the widely adopted InterVASP messaging standard (IVMS-101), said Hugh Madden, CEO of BC Group. (The TRP Working Group is chaired by the Hong Kong-based BC Group and its crypto-focused institutional branch, OSL.)
IVMS-101 has developed a standard data format for the payload of Travel Rule messages. “A RESTful API is the worldwide standard for enterprise systems integration. It is lightweight, well understood and very interoperable. You don't need to join expensive industry associations either invest in supplier solutions and this is not an overly complicated technical implementation ".
Time of implementation
Travel Rule solutions coming to market include a number of approaches. Some solutions involve heroic attempts to preserve decentralization as much as possible while building global directories of VASPs, while others focus on the complicated business of discovering VASPs; in other words, report who is on the other side of a transaction and whether they can be trusted with customer data.
The work the TRP is doing, Madden said, isn't as interested in the discovery part, but rather focuses on the process by which companies can conformally deliver the information payload.
Inflate the ranks of the TRP
Unsurprisingly, TRP members are growing, given the financial weight of its founding team. A spokesperson for the group said that although the names of the new members could not be disclosed without their permission, four major exchanges and a number of large tech companies are included.
What can be revealed, however, is that the new TRP API has been supplemented by the consortium of financial institutions behind Pyctor, a digital asset custody solution included in this year's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) sandbox cohort. Led by ING Bank, Pyctor includes ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas Securities Services, Citi, Invesco, Société Générale, State Street and UBS.
