TRISA Joins OpenVASP Association to Advance Open, Privacy-Preserving Travel Rule Infrastructure
TRISA’s Working Group, Global Directory Service and TRISA Envoy will continue under the stewardship of the Swiss-based OpenVASP Association.
The OpenVASP Association is pleased to announce that the Travel Rule Information Sharing Alliance (TRISA) has joined the Association.
The TRISA Working Group, Global Directory Service (GDS), TRISA Envoy and related interoperability work now come under the stewardship of OpenVASP, an independent, vendor-neutral Swiss membership association.
For VASPs/CASPs, banks and service providers already using TRISA, the immediate message is simple: business as usual.
Existing implementations using the TRISA peer-to-peer network of VASPs, or TRISA Envoy, will continue to be maintained and supported. The TRISA Working Group will also continue under OpenVASP.
Rotational Labs, which has provided the technical infrastructure and support behind TRISA, will continue to operate and support the TRISA infrastructure on behalf of OpenVASP.
“TRISA and OpenVASP have worked toward the same objective for years: open, interoperable and privacy-preserving infrastructure that regulated institutions can actually use,” said Andrew Davidson, President of the OpenVASP Association and co-convener of the Joint Working Group for interVASP Messaging Standards, which maintains IVMS101. “Bringing this work together gives the community a stronger common home for open standards and interoperability, while preserving the infrastructure and expertise institutions already rely on.”
TRISA and TRP under a common organisational home
OpenVASP already stewards the open, royalty-free Travel Rule Protocol (TRP).
With TRISA joining the Association, two established open Travel Rule protocols and their interoperability work now have a common organisational home.
TRISA and OpenVASP/TRP emerged independently with closely aligned goals: creating open standards and protocols for securely transmitting originator and beneficiary information between VASPs while preserving privacy.
The initiatives were cooperating publicly by 2020. TRISA and TRP subsequently established interoperability in 2023.
That interoperability work will continue as OpenVASP develops TRISA and pursues interoperability with other Travel Rule networks worldwide.
Open-source TRISA Envoy
OpenVASP now owns and stewards the TRISA Envoy open-source codebase.
TRISA Envoy is an MIT-licensed implementation supporting both TRISA and TRP messaging. It provides a REST/JSON API for Travel Rule messaging using the IVMS101 data standard and can be self-hosted in an institution’s own environment.
OpenVASP will continue developing TRISA Envoy as an open implementation for Travel Rule interoperability.
“Open source matters because institutions should be able to understand, deploy and integrate the infrastructure they depend on,” said Benjamin Bengfort, CEO of Rotational Labs. “Rotational Labs has supported TRISA from its early development, and we will continue that work for OpenVASP, preserving continuity for organisations already using the network.”
Privacy-preserving peer-to-peer exchange
Privacy remains a core principle of both TRISA and OpenVASP.
The TRISA GDS uses a certificate authority model to provide secure mTLS certificates and counterparty discovery. Travel Rule information itself is exchanged directly between authenticated counterparties using encrypted and signed Secure Envelopes rather than being collected in a central pool of customer data.
Governance continuity
The combination also brings additional TRISA experience into OpenVASP governance.
Benjamin Bengfort, CEO of Rotational Labs, and Carol Van Cleef, Founder & CEO of Luminous Group, have joined the OpenVASP Association’s board.
The TRISA Working Group will continue under OpenVASP, giving existing contributors a continuing forum for developing TRISA infrastructure and interoperability.
About the OpenVASP Association
The OpenVASP Association is an independent, vendor-neutral Swiss non-profit membership association supporting open, interoperable and privacy-preserving infrastructure for crypto-asset compliance.
Its members and working group participants include regulated virtual-asset businesses, financial institutions and technology providers working together on open standards, protocols and software for Travel Rule compliance.
OpenVASP stewards TRP and now also the TRISA Working Group, Global Directory Service and TRISA Envoy.
For more information, visit openvasp.org and travelrule.io.