Does cryptocurrency exchanges need general messaging?

Leah Callon-Butler is the head of a consulting firm Emphasis, which focuses on technology in promoting economic development in Asia. In her post on CoinDesk, she wrote that international standards are what we take for granted. 

In fact, it is. Not so many people were surprised even at the possibility of withdrawing cash from an ATM that does not belong to their own bank or the convenience of reading and scanning a QR code. As well as the ability of a computer to communicate with other similar devices around the world, to receive and interpret a variety of data that can come from anyone at any time of the day or place. No one else thinks about it, because now it’s the standard.

The same with SWIFT, which is considered as a standard for secure and reliable financial communications. This is a worldwide network that provides the opportunity to banks and financial institutions to send and receive money transfer information.

Standards have recently become very important for cryptography. The new set of rules says that each registered crypto movement entity, like the rest of the financial ecosystem, should comply with global standards for combating the financing of terrorism and money laundering.

These new rules have been developed to increase the transparency of illegal activities. It means that such virtual asset providers like exchanges should begin to share information about the sender and receiver on both sides of the crypto transactions. To do it, they will have to speak the same language. Thus, the option of a global data standard suddenly became apparent.

Finance ministers, regulators, and central banks have been complaining for years about standardizing cross-border data flows between the confusion of internal rules and practices. Their goal is not uniformity, but inclusiveness.

Global standards must be flexible enough so that they can be applied locally, taking into account all aspects. Developers need to create something more universal, because the methods that people usually build too often in bunkers put the ecosystem at risk of being fragmented, oriented to the west and struggling with compatibility in functionality. Alexander Kech calls the VASP Joint Messaging Standards Working Group as a good example of how everything should be designed.

The process began at the end of last year and its goal was to develop a universal and common language for messaging between VASP. Experts hold weekly newsgroups on a rotation list and the most active members of the group are 100 people from Asia.

Moreover, by May of this year interVASP plans to release a new standard IVMS101. They are ready to accept it in the industry, although it usually takes some time to get an approved ISO standard.

Standards are the seeds of compatibility and our chance to do it right. We will keep you updated with all the news about the new rules and standards. Stay tuned!