Open Transaction Layer Launches to Build the Coordination Standard for Onchain Finance

A founding alliance spanning financial institutions, payment and infrastructure providers, and blockchain foundations including Checkout.com, Cross River Bank, MetaMask, Robinhood, Securitize, zerohash and Fireblocks, publishes open specifications for secure and compliant transaction coordination, across any counterparty.

NEW YORK, May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Transaction Layer (OTL) launched today as an open industry initiative to build the coordination standard that onchain finance needs to scale. OTL defines shared protocols for identity, messaging, and transaction coordination across institutions, unhosted wallets, and agents. The founding partners include: Fireblocks, B2C2, Blockchain Payments Consortium (includes The Open Network Foundation - TON, Stellar Development Foundation, Polygon, Monad Foundation, Solana Foundation, Sui Foundation, Mysten Labs), Checkout.com, Coins.ph, Cross River Bank, eToro, FalconX, MetaMask, Moonpay, Orbital, Privy + Bridge, Robinhood, Securitize, SoFi, Taptap Send, Tazapay, Triple-A, WalletConnect, Wintermute, Xendit, Zengo, Zerocap, and zerohash.

Institutions are coming onchain and ready to scale. Blockchain infrastructure can support it. What's holding back widespread adoption isn't technical readiness, it's the absence of a shared coordination layer: one that defines how counterparties find each other, establish compliance, and settle transactions across different wallet types, chains, and jurisdictions. Today, every institution running onchain transactions builds this layer themselves. Each new counterparty, jurisdiction, or use case means another bilateral integration, another compliance workaround, or a blocker, such as reaching non-custodial wallets and AI agents compliantly. The costs compound, and it falls on every institution.

OTL was founded to close these gaps with a single interoperable foundation, rather than leaving every participant building in closed loops. It draws on proven standards, including W3C DIDs, IVMS101, ISO 20022, CAIP-19, and organizes them into a modular architecture that covers the full transaction lifecycle: discovery, coordination, compliance, and settlement.

"Regulated institutions have to build bespoke connections to orchestrate their digital asset operations end-to-end. The result is integration sprawl and parallel systems that don't reconcile" said Idan Ofrat, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Fireblocks. "A standard like this isn't something any single vendor can ship. It only works as an open initiative, built by the people implementing it. This is why we are a founding partner of OTL and inviting the broader industry to collaborate."

Checkout.com supports OTL to help advance open standards for secure, interoperable onchain transaction coordination across wallet types, counterparties, and jurisdictions.

Max Rotham, VP of Crypto at Checkout.com, noted: "Open Transaction Layer reflects the kind of open, interoperable standards the industry needs as commerce becomes more programmable, tokenized, and, over time, agent-led. As onchain activity scales, merchants and institutions need clearer ways to identify counterparties, exchange the right transaction context, and coordinate securely across wallets, chains, and jurisdictions. We're pleased to support OTL as this coordination layer takes shape."

OTL specifications cover four technical layers: identity, session, transport, messaging. Above them sits a fifth: applications. This is where the standards become operational. Any institution can build applications that combine elements from the layers below to solve coordination problems such as authenticating payment requests, attributing a wallet to its controlling entity, or being able to accept/reject a transaction before funds move. Each application can be adopted independently, and scales to the entire OTL network. OTL works across diverse wallets, blockchains, and transport mechanisms by design, establishing an interoperable standard the whole industry can build and scale on.

The OTL specifications are publicly available under an open source license at otl.network. Reference implementations will be published progressively as the standards mature. The alliance is open to new members, and is actively calling on institutions running onchain operations to contribute. Standards work when the industry builds them together.

About Open Transaction Layer (OTL)

Open Transaction Layer (OTL) is an open protocol stack for coordinating onchain transactions - in a secure and compliant way, between any counterparties. It is an industry initiative bringing together institutions, payments, infrastructure, and blockchain organizations. OTL provides shared specifications for identity, messaging, and coordination, composing existing standards into an interoperable foundation.

SOURCE Open Transaction Layer