The institutional debate around Web3 has evolved to questions about safety, accountability and regulatory readiness. Cleanverse CEO Ceridwen Choo described a model for “clean identity” and “clean money” built to bring bank-grade verification, traceability and rule adherence to on-chain finance. She framed Cleanverse as a “safe house for on-chain finance”, where the interlocking of bank-verified users and verified regulated assets is programmed and embedded in every value transfer. This unified compliance and governance structure is designed to make Web3 usable by banks, corporates and licence-bound financial intermediaries.

Although Cleanverse is only two months into its public launch, Choo noted that the ideation and underlying technology went through almost eight months of development before release. The company, Cleanverse International, was incorporated in Singapore earlier this year and positions itself as a compliance-native infrastructure provider designed to sit above public chains rather than operate as a licensed issuer or custodian. It fits a market gap for  licensed institutions operating regulated activities such as stablecoin issuance or money transmission, providing  a neutral platform for the verification of identities against a globally accepted standard, bank-grade know-your-customer (KYC), and for value-verification against regulated assets, bank-grade anti-money laundering (AML) that traditional financial institutions require. The firm is led by Choo in her capacity as co-founder and CEO, drawing on more than two decades of experience in banking and payments.

Choo emphasised that the architecture is not designed to change Web3’s openness, but to insert an enforceable layer of trust that licensed banks already recognise. The chain-agnostic infrastructure combines technology to generate a bank-verified, identity-bound credential  and verified regulated stablecoins or tokenised deposits. Both are interlocked at the point of transfer.

Cleanverse’s participation at the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) 2025 is intentional. Choo explained that the firm chose SFF as its first major public platform because it needs to be “where our potential users are”, including banks, corporates and licensed Web3 providers evaluating how to manage on-chain finance safely. This may include stablecoin flows and the issuance of tokenised deposits or assets. The company also views SFF as a strategic venue to engage regulators and institutions on the shift “from anonymous to accountable” and to demonstrate how a bank-grade compliance layer can be applied to public-chain environments. This aligns with the event’s technology blueprint theme and provides Cleanverse with an early opportunity to position its newly launched infrastructure within global industry conversations.

Clean identity and clean money as a foundation for safe on-chain finance

Choo defined “clean identity” and “clean money” as the application of existing Web2 banking governance to Web3 so that transactions carry accountability. She stated that in traditional finance “between you and I, when we transact, we all expect money to be clean,” and Cleanverse applies “the same governance from what we are familiar with in the banking industry” into Web3. Clean identity begins with verifying a user’s “bank identity to show that this user already observes bank rules in the real world”, using open banking infrastructure rather than creating new verification standards. This provides a connective tissue that aggregates the state of fragmentised KYCs performed among licensed Web3 providers such as centralised exchanges and on/off-ramp entities, without a standard framework. 

Once verified, Cleanverse issues an A-Pass, an “identity token” that is “identity bound” to the user’s wallet and “cannot be unbound.” This makes the wallet a persistent, bank-verified transactional identity. It allows users to bring any wallet, including decentralised finance (DeFi) or private-chain wallets, into a regulated-grade environment as long as they volunteer a bank credential for verification.

Clean money is the second pillar. Choo stressed that the system only works if value itself is verified. Regulated stablecoins, such as USDC, must be routed through a “licenced entity” before entering Cleanverse. On entry, Cleanverse “double cleans” the stablecoin by locking the original token in a smart contract and wrapping it with Cleanverse’s own technology to generate  an A-token such as aUSDC. These A-tokens retain the value of the underlying regulated stablecoin but carry Cleanverse’s enforceable compliance attributes. When users need to make transfers to non-verified wallets, they withdraw from Cleanverse and the original stablecoins are unlocked back to their wallets. However, from thereon, the traceability and safety of verified transfers stop. 

Identity and money are then “interlocked” so that every transfer always contains proof of a verified user and a verified asset, resulting in Travel Rule-compliant or bank-grade compliant transfers. Choo said this removes the need for an external Travel Rule provider because “every time the transaction happens, the two primary principles of compliant finance is interlocked”, and a Cleanverse dashboard can instantly produce a “data report that’s auditable, straightforward and compliant”.

Embedding governance, interoperability and accountability into Web3 infrastructure

Choo positioned Cleanverse as an infrastructure layer, not a blockchain, and repeatedly framed its purpose as adding accountability to a previously anonymous environment. She noted that Web3 “is a playground, born out of DeFi,” but argued that institutions require rule observance to transact safely. In a new world where trust has shifted from institutions to self-custody, her recurring theme is the shift “from anonymous to accountable” so that end users become accountable for the new state of trusted finance on-chain.

She stated that institutional hesitation stems from fragmentation, inconsistent AML and KYC practices across digital asset exchanges and a lack of a portable standard for verifying counterparties and funds. Cleanverse attempts to solve this by establishing “one standard” for on-chain finance, anchored on bank-grade verification enabled by open banking infrastructure that is developed and regulator-endorsed to encourage financial innovation, rather than on multiple overlapping Web3-native solutions.

Interoperability is also a core principle. Cleanverse is “chain agnostic,” already operating on Solana, Ethereum Base and soon, Build and Build (BNB) in its test network, with the intention to provide “more than 95% coverage” of the on-chain institutions care about. Instead of locking institutions into private blockchains, Choo argued that banks are seeking ways to break out of private-chain silos in favour of public-chain interoperability. Cleanverse provides the guardrails to make that possible because the identity and money layers remain verified regardless of the chain used.

Choo also highlighted how Cleanverse maintains data privacy. Bank credentials are used only for verification and are “pushed back into the user's device” for storage. Only a hash of the verification is kept on-chain for retrieval by regulatory or enforcement bodies.    The blockchain stores only hashed identifiers. Only when required for enforcement can the hash be unlocked to reveal underlying information. Transaction-level data remains visible on-chain, as expected, but identity information is minimised and protected.

Institutional use cases, tokenised deposits and integration with financial intermediaries

Banks and licenced financial institutions are a primary audience. Choo stated that banks are exploring tokenised deposits as a more practical first step than issuing their own stablecoin. In Cleanverse, a bank can tokenise customer deposits into a bank-branded token, but retain visibility, control and the ability to interoperate with stablecoins that are ‘double-verified’ by way of a wrapped  token generated on stablecoins such as USDC within the Cleanverse “safe house”.
She explained how a bank’s proprietary token can circulate with full confidence within Cleanverse, while conversions into USDC remain fully visible and verified. Choo argued that this gives banks a way to participate in Web3 liquidity without taking on unmanageable risk.

Cross-border payment providers are another early adopter segment. She noted that fintechs “cannot resist, cannot decline touching stablecoins such as USDC because the demand is there,” but face high operational effort in safeguarding flows. Cleanverse provides a compliance baseline, reducing operational burden and allowing providers to off-ramp into banks with flows accompanied by traceability reports that are generated in real-time and audit-ready.

Institutional integration is straightforward. Choo said banks only need “two application programming interfaces (APIs)” and a minor user interface (UI) change such as adding a “pay in Web3” button next to existing payment rails. Institutions can create a verified wallet almost instantly via an API from Cleanverse. A separate API is also available for institutions to trigger deposits for transfers in Cleanverse with tokenised deposits or stablecoins.

Choo also described Cleanverse’s role in enabling corporates. She noted growing pressure on corporates to receive USDC for cash-flow reasons, as stablecoin transfers are received almost in real-time compared with bank settlement days. Cleanverse gives them a verified environment to receive, trace and produce a downloadable Travel Rule report for every transaction in real-time, which is not possible elsewhere in Web3 today.

Standards, regulation and the path to institutional Web3

Cleanverse deliberately mirrors existing regulatory practices. Choo repeatedly said she will not “innovate faster than what open banking does,” instead treating open banking as the baseline for global interoperability. Open banking is the infrastructure that facilitates fintech growth in Web2, so it should also be leveraged for the proper growth and development of Web3 providers.  She emphasised that the decades of governance resilience in traditional banking should be re-established in Web3 and not replaced with any new standards.

Cleanverse’s design as an infrastructure layer that only provides identity and value verification is intentionally structured to avoid licensing requirements, allowing it to scale across borders. Nonetheless, she confirmed that legal opinions have been sought across Singapore and Hong Kong, with pending outcomes for Europe and the US to validate its status.
On risk, she acknowledged that the smart contract used to lock incoming stablecoins must be “audited every six months”, even though Cleanverse will serve more as a transactional platform rather than a protocol holding large pools of funds for other purposes such as  trading or staking. Data exposure is minimised, and the infrastructure only locks the original stablecoins in smart contracts before autonomously generating wrapped tokens for transfers in Cleanverse. Choo described the next 12 to 18 months as a period where tokenised deposits for corporates to manage cross-border payments and high-asset under management (AUM) customers to access and tokenised money market funds, may become early institutional products. She sees growing collaboration between banks and licenced Web3 providers as the practical path to scale, with Cleanverse serving as the “connective tissue” that converts institutional rules into programmatic enforcement on-chain.

A blueprint for accountable institutional Web3

Choo argued that institutional Web3 will only scale when banks, corporates and cross-border providers can transact with the same confidence they have in traditional finance. Cleanverse’s proposition rests on replacing anonymity with accountable identity, and uncontrolled asset movement with verified and traceable value transfer. By binding identity and money, enforcing double-verification of regulated stablecoins and providing consistent reporting through a unified compliance layer, Cleanverse aims to make Web3 usable at institutional scale without requiring institutions to redesign their governance, verification or risk models.

Her consistent message is that institutions already understand these governance principles. Cleanverse simply transfers them to Web3 in a programmable form. Whether it becomes the institutional standard will depend not on technology alone, but on whether banks and regulators accept this model as the safe and scalable path into public-chain ecosystems over the next decade.