Zürich, Switzerland; 16 April 2020 – The OpenVASP Association today announced that EPAM Systems, a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and development services, has joined the Association as a member. With its global footprint spanning more than 30 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, EPAM’s membership in the Association will further accelerate the development of the OpenVASP protocol by developing a second implementation in Java and helping Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Travel Rule.
Launched in November 2019, the OpenVASP initiative aims to provide a roadmap to FATF compliance based on an open source protocol allowing for secure communication of sender and beneficiary information for crypto asset transactions between VASPs. The OpenVASP protocol is designed to be technology-agnostic, fully decentralized and extensible so that it may be adopted broadly by VASPs of all sizes using multiple implementations and at minimal cost.
These principles mirror EPAM’s strong commitment to the development of open source software. With more than 1,300 contributors and 100,000 commits in the public domain, the company is ranked in the top 20 global commercial organizations for the number of employees who are active contributors to the open source community.
“With alternative crypto assets becoming more mainstream, there is a need in the market to align investors, market participants and regulations to a common standard,” said Balazs Fejes, Co-Head of Global Business, EPAM. “OpenVASP provides a transparent, trusted protocol for reporting crypto asset transactions, and we are pleased to partner with the association to support the open source community and provide an innovative solution to this challenge.”
The Java implementation of the OpenVASP protocol, which will be developed by EPAM, follows the C# implementation already in progress with the support of the association’s founding members – Bitcoin Suisse, Lykke, Seba Bank, Sygnum Bank, MME Legal and Avaloq.
With two implementations of the protocol and the support of a global leader like EPAM, the OpenVASP initiative continues to accelerate its progress and gain traction as the foremost solution available to VASPs around the world.
“We are very pleased that EPAM are joining in this open source effort to build OpenVASP. Their participation shows that the protocol is gaining more and more international traction and with a second implementation being developed, it highlights the broad range of open ecosystems now building on OpenVASP.” said David Riegelnig, Head Risk Management at Bitcoin Suisse.
The OpenVASP Association, officially formed as a Swiss non-profit as of recently, continues to welcome new members and contributions from the open source developer community. More information, including the OpenVASP Whitepaper and GitHub repository are available at: www.openvasp.org/.
About the FATF Travel Rule
In June 2019, the Financial Action Task Force, the international body tasked with overseeing efforts to fight money laundering and terrorist financing, announced that its Recommendation 16, which relates to the transfer of sender and beneficiary information during wire transfers, would also apply to the transaction of crypto assets between regulated entities (labelled Virtual Asset Service Providers or VASPs), such as brokers, exchanges and banks. This guideline is commonly referred to as the Travel Rule and is accepted those 37 countries which make up its members.
