Robinhood, MetaMask, and Solana Back New On-Chain Finance Standard to Break Crypto Silos

Fireblocks launched the Open Transaction Layer on May 28, a proposed coordination standard for on-chain finance backed by more than 30 financial institutions, wallet providers, and blockchain foundations, including Robinhood, MetaMask, eToro, the Solana Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, Polygon, TON, Sui, and Monad.

The initiative targets what Fireblocks describes as "integration sprawl": the pattern where every institution building on-chain infrastructure creates bespoke compliance, identity, and messaging systems for each counterparty it works with. The result, according to the company, is a proliferation of parallel systems that never reconcile across platforms.

"Regulated institutions have to build bespoke connections to orchestrate their digital asset operations end-to-end," said Idan Ofrat, Fireblocks co-founder and Chief Product Officer. "The result is integration sprawl and parallel systems that don't reconcile. A standard like this isn't something any single vendor can ship."

OTL's Five-Layer Technical Architecture

The OTL specification, published open source at otl.network, organizes the full transaction lifecycle into five layers: identity, session, transport, messaging, and an application layer that combines the lower four into end-to-end operational flows. The framework draws on established standards including W3C DIDs, IVMS101, ISO 20022, and CAIP-19.

The practical gaps OTL targets span several institutional pain points: counterparty discovery and wallet attribution, Travel Rule completion, cross-chain compliance checking, transaction approval coordination, and safe interaction with AI agents. Fireblocks identified low Travel Rule completion rates and man-in-the-middle risk in payment requests as specific security problems the identity and session layers address.

The Solana Foundation's participation comes through the Blockchain Payments Consortium, a group of six layer-1 foundations (alongside Stellar, Polygon, TON, Sui, and Monad) that joined OTL as a bloc. For Solana, the standard creates a common interface through which institutions already using Fireblocks custody can coordinate compliance and messaging on-chain without Solana-specific integration work.

Robinhood Agentic Trading and the AI Agent Coordination Problem

The launch documentation explicitly addresses AI agent coordination as a design requirement. Robinhood's Agentic Trading and Credit Card products already rely on Model Context Protocol servers, and OTL's backers argue that agent-driven on-chain activity requires shared standards for authorization, limits, wallet acceptability, and transaction reversibility before the category can scale safely. Max Rotham, VP of Crypto at Checkout.com, framed the timing this way: "Open standards the industry needs as commerce becomes more programmable, tokenized, and, over time, agent-led."

Initial Applications and Gaps

Fireblocks plans to publish reference implementations progressively as specifications mature. Two initial application-layer workflows are planned: Universal Deposit and Wallet Attribution.

The alliance's current composition is notable for its absences as much as its membership. Major exchanges including Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken are not founding members, nor are stablecoin issuers Circle or Tether. Whether those players adopt OTL or develop competing coordination approaches will determine how much of the institutional transaction surface the standard actually covers.

Specifications are available under an open source license at otl.network.