Fireblocks, Robinhood, MetaMask, and more than two dozen other financial and crypto firms have joined forces to launch the Open Transaction Layer (OTL), an industry-wide effort to build the coordination standard required for onchain finance to scale globally.

OTL establishes shared protocols for identity, messaging, and transaction coordination between institutions, unhosted wallets, and AI-driven agents, according to a Thursday press release.

In addition to Fireblocks, Robinhood, and MetaMask, the alliance debuted with support from other major players including Checkout.com, FalconX, Wintermute, Cross River Bank, Securitize, SoFi, WalletConnect, and the Blockchain Payments Consortium whose members are TON Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, Polygon, Solana Foundation, Monad Foundation, Sui Foundation, and Mysten Labs.

What OTL is trying to solve

OTL targets the lack of interoperability in digital asset markets, where institutions today rely on fragmented bilateral integrations to manage compliance, messaging, and transaction workflows between counterparties and wallet types.

Each new counterparty or market introduces additional operational overhead, compliance complexity, and interoperability challenges.

“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,” Idan Ofrat, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Fireblocks, said in a statement.

OTL wants to address these issues through a unified and interoperable foundation built on established standards including W3C DIDs, IVMS101, ISO 20022, and CAIP-19. The framework is designed to support the complete transaction lifecycle, including discovery, coordination, compliance, and settlement.

“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,” Ofrat stated.

Four technical layers plus one application layer

The specifications are organized into four technical layers (identity, session, transport, and messaging) topped by a fifth application layer where business logic lives.

The bottom layers handle who you are, how you connect, and how data moves. The top layer is where you do things like authenticate a payment request or verify which entity controls a given wallet, as explained by the team.

Discussing the launch, Max Rotham, VP of Crypto at Checkout.com, said the rise of programmable and tokenized commerce is increasing the demand for interoperable coordination standards across the digital asset ecosystem.

“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,” Rotham stated.

OTL’s specifications are publicly available under an open source license at otl.network, with reference implementations expected to roll out over time. The initiative is actively inviting institutions and ecosystem participants to contribute to the standards effort.