By the Venom Foundation
Monetary authorities in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and emerging markets like the Philippines have spent two years running blockchain pilots and a trend has formed in what they are actually buying. Raw speed is rarely the deciding factor. When a central bank, finance ministry or leading fintech company is evaluating a network for a national payments infrastructure, the promise of “one million GST” and “near zero fees” tends not to survive the first meeting.
The work checklist is closer to a procurement document and has about seven requirements. Here’s what’s on it and why.
1. Built-in account abstraction
A citizen who receives a pension should never encounter the word “gas”. A system that requires users to acquire a separate token to pay a fee in order to transfer money they already hold does not function as public infrastructure. Account abstraction pushes the logic of fees, recovery, and transaction sponsorship down to the protocol layer, so the wallet behaves like a banking application. Venom was designed around this from the base layer: its asynchronous actor model architecture treats each account as a smart contract, making sponsored transactions and mined fees a native property rather than an add-on.
2. Deterministic finality less than a second, without reorganizations
For retail payments and securities settlements, probabilistic finality is a handicap. A network cannot tell a regulator that a settled transaction might roll back if a longer chain appears. Monetary authorities want a deterministic, Byzantine fault-tolerant finality, in which a confirmed block cannot be canceled, and delivered in less than a second. Venom uses BFT consensus with dynamic partitioning intended to keep finality fast and irreversible as throughput increases, rather than trading finality for the number of core transactions.
3. Native support for KYC, AML and KYT at the protocol level
Compliance enforced at the application layer is fragile. Regulators now expect the network itself to support identity, filtering, and transaction monitoring (KYT) hooks, so the rules go with the asset. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has been explicit about this: its tokenization work prioritizes authorized designs that inherently meet anti-money laundering and know-your-customer standards, with automated compliance checks integrated into the settlement flow. Venom’s hybrid model, which keeps both controlled and decentralized components in a single architecture, is designed for this.
4. Signature threshold for institutional care
Single-key custody is unacceptable for sovereign wealth funds. Institutional custody requires threshold signatures and multi-party calculation (MPC), where no party holds a complete key and a quorum is required to authorize a transfer. It’s the same control philosophy that conservation regulators apply to traditional infrastructure, and it turns a key tradeoff into an incident rather than a disaster. A network intended for public reserves must natively support these devices.
5. Multi-chain interoperability without third-party bridges
According to Chainalysis, the attackers stole approximately $2 billion spread across 13 separate cross-chain bridge hacks in 2022, accounting for 69% of all cryptocurrencies stolen that year (chainalysis.com). The Ronin exploit cost approximately $625 million; Wormhole lost about $320 million; Nomad lost around $190 million. Bridges are attractive because they consolidate collateral into a single point. No regulator will approve infrastructure whose interoperability depends on the exact mechanism operated for the largest flights in the industry’s history. Instead, the requirement is native cross-chain messaging at the protocol level instead of guard bridges. Venom pursues this through a native mesh network approach to cross-chain communication, which removes the standalone bridge as a point of failure.
6. Provable availability with public and verifiable metrics
A claim of “99.99% availability” carries no weight without a public record that anyone can verify. National infrastructure operators are held to service levels comparable to card networks, and they expect the same from the ledger beneath them: a transparent block explorer, published validator and availability metrics, and history that is not controlled by the provider. Venom maintains a public block explorer, VenomScan, where transactions and network activity are openly searchable.
7. An issuer registered under an active virtual asset regime
The last criterion is jurisdictional, and it is increasingly decisive. A regulator will not rely on a token whose issuer is in a legal limbo; they want the issuing entity to be registered and supervised within a functional virtual asset framework. Three points of reference dominate the conversation:
- MAS (Singapore)which coordinates tokenization through Project Guardian – over 40 financial institutions in seven jurisdictions – and Project Orchid, and is testing settlements with a Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC on its SGD Testnet (mas.gov.sg).
- VARA (Dubai)the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority established under Dubai Law No. 4 of 2022, which authorizes and supervises virtual asset service providers under comprehensive regulations aligned with FATF standards (vara.ae).
- ADGM (Abu Dhabi)of which the FSRA manages one of the first point-in-time virtual asset frameworks in the region.
What matters is accountability before the law. Venom directly addresses this requirement: its executives, including CEO Christopher Louis Tsu, have publicly engaged monetary authorities, including an open letter to the MAS, and the project’s current focus is regulated deployment in Southeast Asia.
Where that leaves the market
A blockchain bid for national mandate no longer competes with Bitcoin or Ethereum for attention. It is competing with SWIFT, Visa B2B Connect and Partior for a contract. The networks that win will be those that close out each item on this list before the first call with a regulator. This is the standard Venom is working towards: account abstraction, deterministic finality, protocol-level compliance, and native cross-chain messaging treated as properties of the network rather than promises about its future.
