Regulatory Data Attestation

Financial institutions can attest to the integrity of transaction monitoring and sanctions screening data feeds. This creates an immutable audit trail showing:

• That the correct, unaltered watchlists and risk rules were applied at a specific time.
• The exact input data used for a compliance decision, enabling regulators to verify process adherence without exposing sensitive customer information.

Banks can generate attestations for key metrics used in capital adequacy calculations, such as Risk-Weighted Assets (RWA) and Leverage Ratios. This provides regulators with cryptographic assurance that:

• The reported figures are derived from the bank's authentic, unmodified source data.
• The prescribed regulatory formulas were applied correctly, reducing the need for manual audits and enabling more frequent, reliable reporting.

Companies can attest to environmental, social, and governance data submitted to frameworks like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) or for EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). This verifies that metrics for carbon emissions, energy consumption, or diversity statistics are reported faithfully from source systems, combating greenwashing by making claims falsifiable.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and DeFi protocols use attestations to create a verifiable record of off-chain governance actions. This can prove:

• The authenticity of a snapshot of tokenholder votes.
• The correct execution of a multisig transaction based on that vote.
• Linking off-chain decisions immutably to on-chain state changes, ensuring procedural integrity.

In trade finance, attestations can cryptographically verify documentation like bills of lading, letters of credit, and certificates of origin. This allows banks and regulators to confirm:

• The authenticity of documents presented for financing.
• That shipment data (weight, location, condition) from IoT sensors has not been tampered with, reducing fraud and streamlining compliance for Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML).

Protocols generate attestations to prove adherence to regulatory frameworks like Travel Rule (FATF Recommendation 16) or sanctions screening.

• Transaction attestations can bundle verified sender/receiver KYC data.
• Smart contract rules automatically check for valid attestations before execution.
• Enables regulated DeFi by separating compliance logic from settlement logic.

Critical for bridging off-chain legal ownership with on-chain tokens. Attestations act as a verifiable bridge for:

• Legal entity status and ownership proof.
• Asset backing and custody proof (e.g., for tokenized treasury bills).
• Regulatory status of the issuer (e.g., SEC exemptions).

This creates a cryptographic audit trail linking the physical asset to its digital representation.

Using verifiable credentials (VCs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to create privacy-preserving attestations.

• A user obtains a VC from a licensed provider attesting to their KYC status.
• They generate a ZK-proof attestation that proves they are verified without revealing their identity.
• Protocols can require this attestation for access to specific services, enabling permissioned yet private compliance.

Generating standardized, verifiable transaction summaries for tax authorities and users.

• Protocols or wallets can issue attestations summarizing a user's annual gains, losses, and income.
• Each summary is cryptographically signed by the data source, making it tamper-proof.
• Reduces manual reconciliation and provides immutable evidence for tax filings.

Facilitating interoperability between different jurisdictional requirements using a common attestation format.

• An entity can issue a single attestation that maps to multiple regulatory frameworks (e.g., MiCA in EU, local VASP rules).
• Regulators themselves can become attestation issuers, providing official, machine-readable rule sets.
• Enables composable compliance where services automatically adapt based on the user's proven regulatory status.

A formal, cryptographically verifiable declaration that a specific statement or set of data is true. In blockchain, this often involves a trusted entity (an attester) signing a hash of the data, creating a digital attestation. This signed proof can be independently verified by anyone, forming the foundational mechanism for trust in systems like Proof of Reserves and decentralized identity.

Information that is natively recorded and permanently stored on a blockchain, such as transaction histories, token balances, and smart contract states. It is immutable and publicly verifiable. Regulatory Data Attestation often involves creating proofs about this data (e.g., total exchange holdings) to bridge the transparent on-chain world with off-chain legal and financial reporting requirements.

A fundamental data structure used to efficiently and securely verify the contents of large datasets. Key features:

• Data Integrity: Hashes of individual records are combined into a single root hash.
• Privacy: Allows proof that a specific piece of data is included in the set without revealing the entire dataset.
• Core to Proofs: Essential for constructing Proof of Reserves and Proof of Liabilities, enabling scalable attestations.

A cryptographic method where one party (the prover) can prove to another (the verifier) that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. In attestation, ZKPs enable privacy-preserving compliance, such as proving an exchange is solvent or a user is accredited without exposing sensitive underlying balances or personal data.