The FATF Travel Rule, defined, and categorically not a Solidus product
No Solidus product implements the Travel Rule. This is not a roadmap statement or a scoping
nuance, a search across every TypeScript, Rust and SQL file in the codebase for ivms101 and
travel_rule returns nothing, re-run 2026-07-31. The term exists in our lexicon as vocabulary
and is not-built.
What it is
FATF Recommendation 16, applied to virtual assets: when a VASP transfers a virtual asset above a threshold, originator and beneficiary information must travel with the transfer to the receiving VASP, names, account identifiers, and depending on the jurisdiction an address or national identifier.
It is the crypto analogue of the wire-transfer information rules that have applied to banks for decades, and it is implemented through national law rather than directly by FATF.
Why it is genuinely hard
- It requires VASP-to-VASP messaging, which means both sides must speak a compatible protocol. Several competing standards exist and interoperability between them is the live problem.
- Counterparty discovery. Before sending data you must establish that the receiving address belongs to a VASP at all, and which one, the "unhosted wallet" question that no scheme fully resolves.
- It moves personal data across borders, which collides with data-protection regimes. Sending more than required is a privacy problem; sending less is a compliance one.
- Thresholds and required fields differ by jurisdiction, so a compliant message in one country may be insufficient in another.
Where an identity credential does and does not touch it
Does: the originator information a VASP transmits is more reliable when the underlying identity was actually verified rather than self-asserted. That is upstream of the rule, and modest.
Does not, and this is the important half: the Travel Rule is a messaging and interoperability problem between institutions. It needs a protocol, a counterparty directory, threshold logic, field mapping, and a way to handle data-protection constraints. Solidus provides none of that.
A portable credential is not a Travel Rule solution and we will not let the adjacency imply otherwise. Compliance failures here carry consequences a marketing overstatement would not survive.