As the crypto industry matures, pragmatism and common sense are slowly creeping into the idealistic, messy business of blockchain technology.
For years, crypto founders have declared that they are reinventing the financial system. And while the focus has been on big ideas and innovative financial engineering, many crypto products and services remain off-limits to regulated organizations.
As banks, OTC desks and institutional investors enter this space, they are discovering that the basic infrastructure of serious financing is lacking, or lacks the compliance tools that allow them to fully participate.
Telegram and JPMorgan was fined $200 million by regulators in 2021 for using these platforms and personal accounts, while scammers have become adept at using them for thefts.
Crypto communication platforms are not suitable for compliance
The Tie, a provider of institutional-grade digital asset data, has begun solving the problem of secure crypto communications, integrating with systems like Global Relay that are already used for back-office compliance between financial players.
“We’ve been so busy addressing the massive pain points in the system that sometimes we forget the basics,” said Josh Frank, CEO of The Tie. “Institutions shouldn’t sign up for compliance, they shouldn’t hope that the person they’re talking to in a Telegram chat is actually the person they say they are. They have rules, they have a duty to enforce them, and existing communication channels in crypto were never built with those requirements in mind.”
According to Frank, the new messaging solution, Bridge, addresses all the needs of institutions that want to be part of the digital asset economy.
“For most users there is nothing wrong with WhatsApp or Telegram as long as they are careful, but for institutions we needed to build a communication platform that is not bad in terms of compliance.”
Melvin Deng, CEO of QCP in Singapore, told Cointelegraph: “Every regulated institution has clear obligations – to know who they are dealing with, to retain data, and to ensure communications are both compliant and auditable. In crypto, these basic principles have long been lost. A platform like Bridge restores that integrity. It brings the standards of institutional finance into a digital-native environment, where identity verification and compliant record keeping are standard, not an afterthought.”
Starting with email domain verification, strict Know Your Business (KYB) rules, and verified identities to eliminate bad actors, Bridge is designed to make B2B messaging accessible to industry participants around the world.
Frank notes that managing teams across multiple communication channels has proven to be a huge headache for compliant organizations. “You have 50 channels to each of your counterparties,” he says, “and each of those channels needs to be cleared and refilled every time someone leaves your company. Every channel is a potential risk, so we built a solution that enables centralized team management, including bulk reassignment of old team members’ channels, including their history, directly to new members.”
An audit log for all blockchain transactions
Included in that history is the automatic audit of transactions between counterparties. “The platform maintains a complete log of transactions and includes verified completion notifications and timestamps and arrival confirmations – the entire process is designed for compliance,” says Frank. “And that persists invariably at the organizational level, so that individual users’ events feed directly into a master data set that tracks all transactions.”
He also notes that Bridge enables privacy-focused access to The Tie’s data platform directly within the app, allowing users to search for contextual information using AI. “Imagine you’re traveling to Singapore for Token2049. You can ask Bridge to load custodians, OTC desks, and prime brokers in Singapore that have raised money in the last two years and have at least $10 million in total funding. Then you can message those parties directly in the app.”
“You can also use the AI to access real-time market sentiment, or discover developer metrics – essentially all of our institutional data is available.”
Bridge will launch in early 2026 as both a web and desktop app, as well as native iOS and Android apps, and Frank claims The Tie will offer the service for just $5 per month, per user.
“It’s designed to be a no-brainer,” he says. “If you’re in crypto, you need this, so the goal isn’t to create more hurdles. It’s simply to make the space more secure, welcome new participants, and keep building the tools that make it the backbone of tomorrow’s global financial system.”