As the crypto industry matures, pragmatism and common sense are slowly creeping into the idealistic, messy business of blockchain tech.
For years, crypto founders have declared that they’re reinventing the financial system. And although 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 the space, they find the basic infrastructure of serious finance either missing, or lacking in the compliance tools that allow them to fully participate.
Telegram and X may be the preferred communication channels of the crypto native, but institutions need more than disposable messages, constant phishing attempts, and managing countless channels with eminently hackable addresses. JPMorgan was fined $200 million by regulators in 2021 for using these platforms and personal accounts, while scammers have become proficient at using them for thefts.
Crypto communications platforms are unfit for compliance
The Tie, a provider of institutional-class digital asset data, has set about solving the issue of secure crypto communication, integrating with systems such as Global Relay that are already used for back office compliance between financial players.
“We’ve been so busy addressing the huge pain points in the system that we sometimes forget about the basics,” said Josh Frank, CEO of The Tie. “Institutions don’t get to opt in to compliance, they don’t get to 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 preserve, and existing comms 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 looking to be part of the digital asset economy.
“There’s nothing wrong with WhatsApp or Telegram for most users so long as they’re careful, but for institutions we had to build a communication platform that doesn’t suck at compliance.”
Melvin Deng, CEO of QCP in Singapore, told Cointelegraph that “Every regulated institution operates under clear obligations – to know who they’re dealing with, to preserve records, and to ensure that communications are both compliant and auditable. In crypto, those basics have long been missing. 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 aren’t afterthoughts but defaults.”
Starting with email domain verification, strict Know Your Business (KYB) rules and verified identities to eliminate bad actors, Bridge is designed to open up B2B messaging for industry participants across the globe.
Frank notes that managing teams across multiple communication channels has proven a huge headache for compliant organizations. “You have 50 channels to each of your counterparties,” he says, “And each one of those has to be depopulated and repopulated every time someone leaves your business. Every one is a potential liability, so we’ve built a solution that allows for centralized team management, including bulk reassignment of old team members’ channels including their history, straight to new members.”
An audit log for all blockchain transactions
Included in that history is automatic auditing of transactions between counterparties. “The platform maintains a complete log of transactions, and includes verified and timestamped notifications of completion, confirmations of arrival – the whole process is designed for compliance,” says Frank. “And that persists immutably at the organization level, so that individual users’ events feed directly into a main dataset tracking all transactions.”
He also notes that Bridge allows for 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 based in Singapore that have raised money in the last two years, and have at least $10M in total funding. Then you can message those parties directly within the app.”
“You can also use the AI to access real-time market sentiment, or to discover developer statistics – essentially all of our institutional-grade data is available.”
Bridge launches 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 at just $5 per month, per user.
“It’s designed to be a no-brainer,” he says. “If you operate in crypto, you need this, so the goal isn’t to put up more hurdles. It’s simply to make the space safer, welcome new participants, and keep building the tools that make this the backbone of tomorrow’s global financial system.”