After enterprises start to go on-chain, compliance is becoming a new watershed

Stablecoins are becoming an everyday tool for more and more businesses. Advertising placements, supply chain procurement, global team payroll… stablecoins finally allow cross-border payments to say goodbye to delays. However, while bringing efficiency, they also bury new hidden compliance risks:

On-chain transfers are fine, but suddenly there are risk controls at the bank;
The supplier's receiving address seems clean, but during the review, it exposes risk links, and so on.

These are not isolated incidents but common "pits" in stablecoin settlements. Avoiding non-compliant paths and establishing a settlement structure that can be clearly explained, tracked, and audited is the long-term moat for business growth.

1. On-chain Transparency ≠ Link Transparency

Many businesses are confused when they first encounter risk control: the on-chain address is clean, so why is there still risk control?

The reason is simple: on-chain transparency does not equal link transparency. What businesses see is the status of a certain address, but regulators focus on the source of funds, the nodes passed through, and the final flow.

From a regulatory perspective, a link may involve: on-chain addresses, off-chain redemption methods, clearing structures, cross-border compliance requirements, bank inflow and outflow paths… Any opaque link ultimately puts the business at risk.

In other words, regulators not only look at whether the transaction is clean but also whether the path can be clearly explained.

2. Structural Risks Hidden in Opaque Paths

Businesses do not want to be non-compliant, but many on-chain settlement methods appear to operate normally on the surface, yet are difficult to audit structurally, which is also the root of frequent risk control issues.

The most typical example is suppliers using a pooled fund structure. All customer funds are mixed together for management, which is cost-effective and efficient, but on-chain ownership is difficult to distinguish. Another type of risk comes from off-chain to on-chain models. The on-chain address may be clean, but the source of off-chain funds has not been reviewed and lacks qualification endorsement. Some businesses cannot see the off-chain part but have to bear the risks that come from it.

There are also issues that occur at the execution level, such as cooperative service providers lacking compliance qualifications, funds passing through unregulated clearing nodes, fund aggregation methods not meeting local requirements, and risk control records not being able to be provided to auditors, etc. Once regulatory or bank investigations are triggered, if the business cannot clarify the flow of funds, it will be placed on a high-risk review list.

These issues ultimately bring three types of risks to businesses:

1. Account Freezing: Many businesses encounter sudden account freezes from banks for the first time, likely due to unclear fund paths. This is not against the blockchain but rather that banks need to take regulatory responsibility for suspicious activities.

2. Address Risk: Whether an address has high-risk activities or whether a smart contract has been flagged can affect the risk level of a business's receivables. As regulations tighten, every step on-chain has become an important basis for assessing business risk.

3. Counterparty Risk: There are many on-chain payment tools, but very few can withstand verification in terms of compliance, auditing, and risk control. Some businesses only discover vulnerabilities in the link when their partners "blow up."

3. Regulatory Tightening: How Should Businesses Build a Compliant Stablecoin Settlement System?

Global regulatory rules for stablecoins are becoming increasingly clear, with the requirements from regulatory agencies in various countries pointing towards: traceable sources, explainable paths, and auditable inflows and outflows.

Stablecoins were once an innovative tool in Web3, and are now gradually being integrated into the mainstream financial system. This means that in the future, businesses using stablecoins must go through compliant paths. Moreover, the larger the business, the more complex the fund paths, necessitating that risk control, clearing, and compliance processes be truly established as infrastructure.

As an innovative financial infrastructure provider connecting Web2 and Web3, Interlace's practices offer some common insights for the industry: to build a clearly explainable link, it is essential to solidify compliance across the four rings of assets, links, clearing, and risk control.

• At the asset level, based on an enterprise-grade, non-custodial MPC wallet architecture and a multi-tiered accounting system, achieve fund isolation and refined asset management. Each fund has independent traceability and will not be mixed into indistinguishable pools, reducing operational and compliance risks from the source.
• At the link level, by leveraging continuously running KYT on-chain behavior analysis and path risk identification mechanisms, businesses can not only determine whether a receiving address is "clean" but also gain insights into its source of funds, link structure, and potential risks, achieving explainability and transparency in on-chain payments.
• At the inflow and outflow level, relying on a multi-jurisdictional licensing system and regulated bank channels, establish a clear audit trail for on-chain assets entering the banking system. Under different regional compliance frameworks, businesses can obtain transparent, verifiable, and archivable inflow and outflow certificates, reducing regulatory uncertainties in cross-border operations.
• At the security level, through a PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant enterprise security system, combined with MPC technology, automated risk control, and 24/7 monitoring, ensure that fund management and user data receive bank-level protection throughout the entire link.

The goal of these mechanisms is not to pile on functions but to establish a transparent, robust, auditable, and scalable underlying financial infrastructure, helping businesses maintain compliance resilience as they grow.

Compliance is Not a Cost, but a Moat in the Era of Stablecoins

The future of stablecoin payments is not about who can transfer faster, but who can prove that their assets and links are clean, transparent, and compliant when necessary.

For businesses using stablecoins, true efficiency has never been about "cheap and fast," but rather "sustainable, auditable, and scalable." Only by establishing explainable links can stablecoins truly become the global settlement infrastructure for businesses, rather than a short-term tool that brings sporadic risks.