Crypto

PayPal adds to list of crypto heavy hitters on the TRUST network

08/23/2022
Bitcoin Ethereum News

Crypto-friendly digital payments giant PayPal has been added to the Travel Rule Universal Solution Technology (TRUST) network, joining a host of big names in crypto that have moved to comply with digital asset travel rules.

The announcement comes two months after the payments giant rolled out infrastructure enabling users to transfer, send and receive digital assets between PayPal and other wallets and exchanges in June this year. Prior to that, users were only able to buy and sell crypto within PayPal, following the firm’s initial jump into the sector in October 2020.

TRUST was launched by a group of 18 United States virtual asset service providers (VASPs) in February, with heavy hitters such as Coinbase, Paxos, Circle, Kraken and Robinhood participating from the get-go. The number has since expanded to 38 now that PayPal has joined the ranks.

“The addition of PayPal marks another milestone in TRUST’s journey to become the global, industry-standard solution for Travel Rule compliance,” Coinbase noted in a Tuesda announcement.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) rule 31, more commonly known as the Travel rule, U.S. VASPs are legally required to pass on specific information relating to customer fund transfers from one financial institution to another. The threshold for identifying fund transfers, and the people behind them, start at $1,000.

As such, the group of U.S. VASPs launched TRUST to streamline reporting and make the sharing of information between them easier and more transparent. TRUST utilizes a solution that is composed of two main features; a centralized bulletin board to identify each VASP party on both ends of a transaction and an encrypted point-to-point (P2P) channel to securely exchange data.

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The group was formed in response to a recommendation from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in June 2021 for VASPs across the globe to adopt specific principles in order to maintain compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) policies.