FATF Travel Rule

The Travel Rule is a rule requiring financial institutions, and, since 2019, crypto businesses, to collect and pass along identifying information about both parties to a transfer whenever it moves through their systems, so that the information "travels" with the money rather than getting stripped out at each hop. Its origin is decades older than crypto: bank wire transfers have carried this obligation for a long time, precisely so that a wire from Account A to Account B can't be laundered through a chain of intermediary banks that each know only "money came in, money went out" with no record of who actually sent or received it.

In 2019, the Financial Action Task Force extended this same obligation to virtual assets, requiring Virtual Asset Service Providers (see VASP) to obtain, hold, and transmit originator information (name, account/wallet identifier, and, depending on implementation, address or national ID number) and equivalent beneficiary information whenever a virtual-asset transfer crosses between two VASPs above a threshold set by national law (the EU set that threshold at zero for crypto transfers under its recast Transfer of Funds Regulation, every transfer is covered, no minimum amount exempts it).

Why it's hard in practice

The traditional wire-transfer version of this rule works because banks already have established, regulated relationships and shared messaging rails (SWIFT). Crypto doesn't have an equivalent: a VASP in one country has no pre-existing relationship with a VASP in another, no shared directory of who operates which wallet address, and no common message format by default. That gap is exactly what data standards like IVMS101 and a cottage industry of Travel Rule messaging vendors (Notabene, Sygna, TRP, and others) exist to close, see the IVMS101 entry for the data-format side of that problem.

Who actually built this

The Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body founded in 1989 and headquartered in Paris, wrote both the original Recommendation 16 and its 2019 extension to virtual assets. FATF sets global standards; it has no direct enforcement power of its own, each country turns the Recommendation into binding law on its own timeline and in its own way, which is why "Travel Rule compliant" means slightly different things in the EU, the US, Singapore, and elsewhere.

Solidus today

Solidus has not built a Travel Rule product. This is checkable, not asserted on faith: a grep across the entire codebase for Travel-Rule-shaped logic (ivms101, vasp, travel_rule) turns up nothing outside marketing copy. Solidus's DIDComm relay is a general-purpose message-transport mediator: it moves encrypted messages between parties, which is a necessary building block for a future Travel Rule messaging product, but is not one itself. A backend branch exploring that direction exists but has not been merged. Stated plainly rather than implied as finished.

See also

IVMS101 is the data format a real Travel Rule implementation would need to speak. VASP is who this rule applies to. MiCA is how the EU turned this global standard into binding law for crypto specifically.