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The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), the only global source of open, standardized and high-quality legal entity reference data, and Chainlink, the industry-standard oracle platform, today announced a strategic partnership to create an institutional-grade identity solution for the blockchain industry. The solution combines GLEIF’s verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) with Chainlink’s infrastructure for Cross-Chain Identity (CCID) and Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) to enable digital asset transactions that are verifiable, compliant, and trusted across jurisdictions while preserving user privacy.
While digital assets are set to transform global finance, the lack of a verifiable identity onchain has been a key barrier to institutional adoption. By enabling verifiable identity data to be embedded directly into onchain assets and smart contracts, Chainlink and GLEIF are empowering institutions and tokenization platforms to seamlessly meet compliance requirements for regulatory frameworks across the globe. This removes the final hurdles for banks, asset managers, and institutional investors ready to implement digital asset solutions at scale and opens up hundreds of trillions in institutional capital to flow onchain.
“GLEIF is thrilled to work with leading technology providers like Chainlink to give institutions a trusted way to self-verify the identity of entities on any blockchain — from wallets and asset issuers to smart contracts. Leveraging the LEI and vLEI, this turns duplicative and manual compliance checks into automated, on-chain workflows. The result is greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability for digital assets compliance. We welcome collaboration with forward-looking partners like Chainlink seeking to embed trusted organizational identity into their platforms and services.” — Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF.
GLEIF’s vLEI serves as the trusted issuer of verifiable credentials. These credentials can be used to prove the legal entity behind any onchain wallet or smart contract. The vLEIs are stored onchain as CCIDs, and can be extended to support additional credential attributes, such as accreditation status or sanctions checks. Applications across blockchains can use Chainlink to reference these CCIDs for real-time verification of information about onchain assets and counterparties. Furthermore, institutions can use Chainlink ACE to embed these credentials directly into their onchain workflows, unlocking trusted, automated digital asset solutions that meet regulatory requirements at global scale.
This transformative new solution unlocks critical capabilities for realizing tokenized finance at scale:
Stablecoin issuers can prove their legal identity at the contract level, ensuring regulators, markets, and users can distinguish between genuine, reserve-backed stablecoins and fraudulent imitations.
Asset issuers and smart contract applications can unlock seamless compliance with regulations across different jurisdictions, such as Europe’s Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCA), the U.S. Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA), and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) requirements.
Custodians and Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) can verify that receiving addresses meet FATF Travel Rule requirements without exposing customer data. ● Banks and asset managers can issue tokenized assets with verifiable provenance throughout the asset’s lifecycle.
Enterprises can restore control of compromised contracts using role-based recovery mechanisms.
Regulators can supervise transactions with assurance of compliance while also preserving user privacy.
Trading venues can restrict participation to verified entities through onchain credential checks.
Investors and institutions can confirm the legal ownership of specific wallets with ease.
“I’m very excited to be working closely with the team at GLEIF. Bringing the LEI identity standard onchain is something that will accelerate the adoption of digital assets by the world’s largest institutions, which is what Chainlink is now at the epicenter of enabling globally. It has been great working with the GLEIF team, and I think their widely used identity standard will also become widely used in the onchain finance world.” — Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink.
With trusted identity and compliance policies embedded directly into contracts and assets, financial institutions, stablecoin issuers, and trading venues can confidently scale tokenized asset solutions globally.
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