Compliance & the Stellar Network

Regulations and compliance aren’t new to blockchain. As in other industries, businesses have to follow existing regulations that apply to the function or service that they provide to their users. In the payments space, those are regulations like AML and KYC that exist to protect against illicit transactions like terrorist financing, fraud, and money laundering.

But compliance in blockchain requires new tools to match the innovative technology, tools that empower businesses and drive towards mainstream adoption. To provide more insight into what that means and how to help the network grow in a safe and compliant way, we hosted a webinar with our partners at Elliptic, the leading provider of crypto-asset risk management solutions.

You can watch the full webinar below to hear a brief overview of Stellar, the SDF partnership with Elliptic, and how businesses on the network who are looking for compliance tools can combine Elliptic’s services with the existing built-in compliance functionality of the Stellar network to enhance their risk assessments.

Here are a few of the key takeaways:

• Stellar has built-in features that enable businesses to issue assets on Stellar and perform compliance checks at any point along their asset’s lifecycle from issuance to redemption.
• While the Stellar protocol provides the built-in functionality to conduct the appropriate compliance checks, the burden of adequately performing those checks falls to the businesses building on Stellar --this is no small feat. With public and immutable ledgers, the amount of information available about the prior transactions of a particular wallet or address can be extensive.
• Companies like Elliptic have built tools to help detangle that web of publicly available information. Their AML compliance software and forensic and investigative services help to identify suspicious wallets and transactions - without gathering sensitive personal information - so businesses can more fully assess risk.
• Recognizing the ecosystem’s need for access to these enhanced tools, SDF partnered with Elliptic and integrated their compliance tools with the Stellar network for lumens. This integration allows for rapid integration to Elliptic’s platform of other Stellar-based assets. So, businesses that want to add these tools for other assets will benefit from Elliptic and SDF’s integration work.
• It’s important to remember that while Elliptic is a preferred partner to Stellar — they are the first and only service that has integrated with the network — the use of their services is certainly not mandatory. This partnership simply adds another tool for businesses to use to manage risk.

These tools are key to broader adoption. For the industry to mature and overcome the skepticism that regulators and law-makers have developed, we all need to address the risks of bad actors taking advantage of the attributes of blockchain technology that help them try to hide illicit activity. The public ledger gives us that ability, but businesses need tools like those that Elliptic has developed to do that effectively and efficiently. These compliance tools really are critical to helping pave the way to greater adoption of blockchain technology and digital currencies.