DeFi Custodian Trustology Gets Green Light From UK’s FCA

The march toward institution-friendly DeFi continues.

AccessTimeIconOct 5, 2021 at 2:30 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 7:01 p.m. UTC
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Cryptocurrency custodian Trustology has been granted a full registration by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), one of a handful of firms to have been upgraded from the U.K. regulator’s temporary registration list.

In addition to the gamut of anti-money laundering (AML) checks, the FCA grilled Trustology about the custody firm’s speciality in decentralized finance (DeFi), said CEO Alex Batlin.

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  • “The engagement was really good when we started talking about what we do for DeFi,” said Batlin. “They were very open, listened a lot and asked questions in order to understand how we do AML checks around DeFi.”

    Getting DeFi institution-ready with added AML and know-your-customer (KYC) checks is now the focus of a number of firms, with solutions ranging from Aave whitelists to decentralized identity plays and even hardware security modules.

    Trustology created a “DeFi Firewall” approach, by which a set of rules in a smart contract can block certain transactions and allow others; swaps on Uniswap might be allowed, while more exotic and less battle-tested platforms would be ruled out. Trustology is adding more features for 2022, such as a transaction decoder, said Batlin.

    “If someone has compromised a website where you use a dapp, if it’s been hacked, instead of sending something to Uniswap you could just be forwarding funds to a thief,” he said, adding:

    “So we decode the transaction you are about to sign, and then we look it up in our registry, and instead of a load of binary, we give you a text saying, ‘You are about to do a swap of ETH for DAI on Uniswap,’ for example.”

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    Ian Allison

    Ian Allison is an award-winning senior reporter at CoinDesk. He holds ETH.


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