Compliance
What is Travel Rule?
The Travel Rule requires financial institutions — and, under FATF guidance, virtual asset service providers — to transmit originator and beneficiary information alongside transfers above a threshold, so that identifying data accompanies the value.
Applying a rule written for correspondent banking to public blockchains is genuinely awkward: the value moves on a permissionless network while the identifying data must travel through a separate channel between providers, and the two have to be reconciled.
In practice this means a compliant transfer above the threshold generates a structured payload exchanged provider-to-provider, keyed to the on-chain transaction. Transfers to self-hosted wallets, which have no provider on the other side, are the part of the rule where jurisdictions differ most.
Related
Definitions are educational and general. Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice, and regulatory descriptions summarise frameworks that change — check the current rules for your jurisdiction before relying on them.