Working Group Formed for OpenVASP Implementation

12 December 2019; Zug, Switzerland – Four of the leading firms in the Swiss crypto assets industry – Bitcoin Suisse, Lykke, SEBA, Sygnum – have announced their cooperation in forming a Working Group to support the OpenVASP initiative with an open-source technical implementation of the proposed protocol. The four companies will pool resources and bring together their collective expertise to build a first version of the OpenVASP protocol based on the initial whitepaper published in November.

The announcement by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in June confirmed that the so-called “travel rule” requiring financial service providers to obtain, hold and transmit originator and beneficiary information for transactions would apply to Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP). In order to meet this challenge, the OpenVasp initiative was launched in November with the support of the Crypto Valley Association (CVA) and the International Digital Asset Exchange Association (IDAXA).

Now after a period of consultation and dialogue, four of the leading VASPs in Switzerland – Bitcoin Suisse, Lykke, SEBA and Sygnum – have announced that they have formed an industry-lead Working Group to build a first technical version of the protocol proposed in the OpenVASP whitepaper. Each of the four companies will contribute time and resources to the project and all development will be open-source. Code for the Working Group’s implementation will be publicly accessible on the OpenVASP GitHub account. This first technical implementation will, first and foremost, focus on enabling travel-rule compliance, while also adhering to the initiative’s core design principles: decentralization, privacy, broad applicability, extensibility, efficiency and a digital asset-agnostic approach.

Additional contributors to the Working Group are welcome.