Today the Open Transaction Layer (OTL) was unveiled to provide open standards for institutional on-chain finance for both TradFi and web3 native organizations, describing it as a “a shared coordination layer”. The movement was founded by Fireblocks after it previously initiated the Blockchain Payments Consortium (BPC) for compliance in December 2025, which includes the foundations behind blockchains such as Monad, Polygon, Solana, Stellar, Sui and TON. The OTL standards aim to cover identity, session, transport and messaging.
In a blog post Fireblocks CEO compared the OTL to the TCP/IP protocol that underpins the internet. He argued that the internet protocol didn’t scale until others were built on top making it useful such as domain resolution (DNS), security (SSL) and transport (http).
“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.” As one of the major integrators, Fireblocks would know. The OTL proposal underlines an uncomfortable truth. Blockchain promised to simplify inter-institutional value transfer with a single source of truth. In practice, institutional adoption has generated a new layer of integration complexity for compliance, identity and counterparty coordination.
Beyond Fireblocks and BPC members, OTL founders include B2C2, Checkout.com, Coins.ph, Cross River Bank, eToro, FalconX, MetaMask, Moonpay, Orbital, Stripe-owned Privy + Bridge, Robinhood, Securitize, SoFi, Taptap Send, Tazapay, Triple-A, WalletConnect, Wintermute, Xendit, Zengo, Zerocap, and zerohash.
While the founding membership is broad, notable absentees include major crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance and Kraken, as well as the leading stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether.
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