Fireblocks, Robinhood, MetaMask and more than two dozen other financial and crypto companies have joined forces to launch the Open Transaction Layer (OTL), an industry-wide effort to build the coordination standard needed to scale onchain finance globally.
OTL establishes shared protocols for identity, messaging and transaction coordination between institutions, unhosted wallets and AI-powered agents, according to a Thursday press release.
In addition to Fireblocks, Robinhood and MetaMask, the alliance debuted with support from other major players including Checkout.com, FalconX, Wintermute, Cross River Bank, Securitize, SoFi, WalletConnect and the Blockchain Payments Consortium whose members include TON Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, Polygon, Solana Foundation, Monad Foundation, Sui Foundation and Mysten Labs.
What OTL is trying to solve
OTL addresses the lack of interoperability in digital asset markets, where institutions today rely on fragmented bilateral integrations to manage compliance, messaging and transaction workflows between counterparties and portfolio types.
Each new counterparty or market introduces additional operational overhead, compliance complexity and interoperability issues.
“Regulated institutions must build tailor-made connections to orchestrate their digital asset activities from end to end. The result is proliferation of integration and parallel systems that cannot be reconciled,” said Idan Ofrat, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Fireblocks, in a statement.
OTL aims to address these issues through a unified and interoperable foundation, built on established standards including W3C DIDs, IVMS101, ISO 20022 and CAIP-19. The framework is designed to support the full transaction lifecycle, including discovery, coordination, compliance and settlement.
“A standard like this is not something that a single vendor can deliver. It only works as an open initiative, built by the people who implement it. That’s why we are a founding member of OTL and invite the broader industry to collaborate,” said Ofrat.
Four technical layers plus one application layer
The specifications are divided into four technical layers (identity, session, transport and messaging), with a fifth application layer on top where the business logic lives.
The bottom layers determine who you are, how you connect, and how data moves. In the top layer, you do things like authenticating a payment request or verifying which entity controls a particular wallet, as explained by the team.
Discussing the launch, Max Rotham, VP of Crypto at Checkout.com, said the rise of programmable and tokenized trading is increasing the demand for interoperable coordination standards in the digital asset ecosystem.
“As on-chain activity increases, merchants and institutions need clearer ways to identify counterparties, exchange the right transaction context, and securely coordinate across portfolios, chains, and jurisdictions. We are pleased to support OTL as this coordination layer takes shape,” said Rotham.
OTL’s specifications are publicly available under an open source license at otl.network, with reference implementations expected to be rolled out over time. The initiative actively invites institutions and ecosystem participants to contribute to the standard efforts.