Crypto Custody Firm Qredo Adds Blockchain Analytics to FATF ‘Travel Rule’ Offering

Cryptocurrency custody and settlement technology firm Qredo has thrown its hat into the ring of compliance solutions aimed at bringing digital assets in line with anti-money laundering (AML) guidance set out by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

The FATF included firms that handle crypto transactions, known as virtual asset service providers (VASP), within its ambit back in mid-2019. The guidance requires exchanges, trading desks and custodians to transfer personally identifiable information along with crypto transactions over a certain threshold. It has come to be known as the “travel rule.”

Qredo, which raised $80 million in funding earlier this year, is focused on interoperability with other solutions such as TRISA, TRP, TRUST, Sygna, VerifyVASP and Notabene, the custody firm said, while there is also an atomic swap option where both counterparties use Qredo’s multi-party-computation (MPC) custody infrastructure.

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The Qredo approach is also useful in the way that it plugs into a range of blockchain analytics tools that many firms will already be familiar with, said Ben Whitby, the firm’s head of compliance. This includes the likes of Chainalysis, Elliptic, TRM Labs, ComplyAdvantage, Coinfirm, VASPNet and Crystal Blockchain.

Whitby said most of the crypto firms Qredo spoke with had spent a good deal of time and money training staff to use blockchain analytics tools of one sort or another. So it made sense to combine trade and compliance work flows with APIs, something that’s particularly useful should the regulator want to probe a given transaction.

“In the event of an investigation from an enforcement agency, you can demonstrate completely that a transaction had the right checks undertaken; a sanctions check, the sending of metadata, and feedback from the beneficiary and so on,” Whitby said in an interview. “It’s all there, instead of having to pull logs and a lot of painful cross-referencing and reconciliation.”