11 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.
About Lykke
Lykke is an investment and financial product provider leveraging the power of the blockchain. Lykke Exchange enables its users to buy, sell and store crypto currencies and all other digital assets securely and offers zero trading fees on nearly 100 assets classes including bitcoin, ethereum, Euros, US Dollar, Swiss francs, and many others. Lykke B2B Digital Solutions builds blockchain based exchanges, as well as trading and loyalty management platforms for enterprise clients, please visit https://www.lykke.com/
Media Contact:
Marina De Mattos
marina.demattos@lykke.com
+41 76 227 41 63
About Bitcoin Suisse
Founded in 2013, Bitcoin Suisse has been a pioneer in providing crypto-financial services. Bitcoin Suisse has helped to shape the crypto-and blockchain-ecosystem in Switzerland and has been a driving force in the development of the ‘Crypto Valley’ and ‘Crypto Nation Switzerland’. As a regulated Swiss financial intermediary (SRO – VQF member), Bitcoin Suisse offers prime brokerage, storage, lending and other crypto-financial services.
For more information, please visit: www.bitcoinsuisse.com
Media Contact:
Ian Simpson
ian.simpson@bitcoinsuisse.com
+41 79 299 1693
About SEBA
Founded in April 2018 and headquartered in Zug, SEBA is a pioneer in the financial industry, building an innovative technological bridge between the digital and traditional asset worlds. As a bank supervised by FINMA, SEBA offers a comprehensive range of services in the field of digital assets and cryptocurrencies, as well as in traditional banking. The wide and vertically integrated spectrum of services, as well as the high security standards make SEBA’s business approach unique. SEBA enables clients to invest, safely keep, trade and borrow against traditional and digital assets, as well as issue tokens in the future, in one place.
For more information on SEBA, please visit https://www.seba.swiss/
Media enquiries:
SEBA Bank AG
Corporate communication
Eva Oberholzer
media@seba.swiss
+41 79 336 49 07
About Sygnum
Sygnum is the world’s first digital asset bank. With its Swiss banking and securities dealer licence, as well as its capital markets services licence in Singapore, Sygnum empowers institutional and private qualified investors, corporates, banks and other financial institutions to invest in the digital asset economy with complete trust. The company is the first digital asset bank with an independently controlled, scalable and future-proof regulated banking solution. Sygnum’s interdisciplinary team of banking, investment and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) experts is shaping the development of a trusted digital asset ecosystem. The company is founded on Swiss and Singapore banking heritage and operates globally.
To learn more about Sygnum, please visitwww.sygnum.com
Media Contact:
Dom Castley
T: +41 58 508 21 01
E: dominic.castley@sygnum.com
Media Contact
Company Name: Lykke Corp
Contact Person: Marina De Mattos
Phone: +41 43 508 63 79
Country: Switzerland
Website: https://www.lykke.com/
