Mauve, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for trading compliant and real world assets, has officially gone live today, the company said in a press release.

The DEX is one of the first non-custodial exchanges to be approved as a virtual asset service provider (VASP) by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, the firm said. It targets asset issuers that need compliance guarantees and controls, allowing secondary markets to exist for on-chain, or tokenized, real-world assets such as fixed income securities.

DEXs are blockchain-based apps that coordinate trading of digital assets between users. In the decentralized environment, users trade without surrendering custody of their assets – as they would have to for a centralized exchange – meaning that no one can misappropriate these digital assets. Mauve was developed in a direct response to the fallout from the collapse of centralized crypto exchange FTX.

Mauve is a subsidiary of Violet, a compliance and identity infrastructure platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) backed by the digital assets unit of hedge fund giant Brevan Howard and the venture capital arm of crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN). DeFi is an umbrella term used for lending, trading and other financial activities carried out on a blockchain, without using traditional intermediaries.

“We believe the future of finance is on-chain,” said Markus Maier, a co-founder of Mauve. “The foundation is our programmable compliance infrastructure, Violet, which we purpose-built for the needs of RWA issuers and institutional buyers,” he added, referring to real-world assets.