Seven Technical Criteria Regulators and Central Banks Use to Choose Blockchains for Financial Infrastructure

By Venom Foundation

Monetary authorities in Singapore, the UAE, and emerging markets like the Philippines have spent two years running blockchain pilots and a pattern has formed in what they actually buy. Raw speed is rarely the deciding factor. When a central bank, a finance ministry, or a tier-one fintech evaluates a network for national payment infrastructure, the deck promising “a million TPS” and “near-zero fees” tends not to survive the first meeting.

The working checklist is closer to a procurement document, and it has settled into roughly seven requirements. Here is what is on it, and why.

1. Built-in account abstraction

A citizen receiving a pension payment should never encounter the word “gas.” A system that forces users to acquire a separate token to pay fees so that they can move money they already hold does not work as public infrastructure. Account abstraction pushes fee logic, recovery, and transaction sponsorship down to the protocol layer, so the wallet behaves like a bank app. Venom was designed around this from the base layer: its asynchronous, actor-model architecture treats every account as a smart contract, which makes sponsored transactions and abstracted fees a native property rather than a bolt-on.

2. Sub-second, deterministic finality with no reorganizations

For retail payments and securities settlements, probabilistic finality is a liability. A network cannot tell a regulator that a settled transaction might reverse if a longer chain appears. Monetary authorities want deterministic, Byzantine-fault-tolerant finality, where a confirmed block cannot be rolled back, delivered in well under a second. Venom uses a BFT consensus with dynamic sharding intended to keep finality fast and irreversible as throughput grows, rather than trading finality away for headline transaction counts.

3. Native KYC, AML, and KYT support at the protocol level

Compliance slapped on at the application layer is fragile. Regulators now expect the network itself to support identity, screening, and transaction-monitoring (KYT) hooks, so the rules travel with the asset. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has been explicit on this: its tokenization work prioritizes permissioned designs that meet anti-money-laundering and Know-Your-Customer standards by nature, with automated compliance checks embedded in the settlement flow. Venom’s hybrid model, which keeps controlled and decentralized components in one architecture, is built for this.

4. Threshold signatures for institutional custody

Single-key custody is unacceptable for sovereign-scale funds. Institutional custody requires threshold signatures and multi-party computation (MPC), where no single party holds a complete key and a quorum is needed to authorize a transfer. It is the same control philosophy custody regulators apply to traditional infrastructure, and it turns a key compromise into an incident rather than a catastrophe. A network intended for public reserves must support these schemes natively.

5. Multichain interoperability without third-party bridges

According to Chainalysis, attackers stole roughly $2 billion across 13 separate cross-chain bridge hacks in 2022, accounting for 69% of all crypto stolen that year (chainalysis.com). The Ronin exploit took about $625 million; Wormhole lost roughly $320 million; Nomad lost about $190 million. Bridges are attractive because they pool collateral at a single point. No regulator will approve infrastructure whose interoperability is dependent on the exact mechanism exploited for the largest thefts in the industry’s history. Instead, the requirement is native, protocol-level interchain messaging instead of custodial bridges. Venom pursues this through a native mesh-network approach to interchain communication, which removes the standalone bridge as a point of failure.

6. Provable uptime with public, verifiable metrics

A claim of “99.99% availability” carries no weight without a public record anyone can audit. Operators of national infrastructure 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 uptime metrics, and a track record that is not controlled by the vendor. Venom maintains a public block explorer, VenomScan, where transactions and network activity are openly queryable.

7. An issuer registered under an active virtual-asset regime

The final criterion is jurisdictional, and it is increasingly decisive. A regulator will not build on a token whose issuer sits in a legal vacuum; they want the issuing entity registered and supervised under a functioning virtual-asset framework. Three reference points dominate the conversation:

• MAS (Singapore), which coordinates tokenization through Project Guardian – over 40 financial institutions across 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 created under Dubai Law No. 4 of 2022, which licenses and supervises virtual-asset service providers under a full rulebook aligned with FATF standards (vara.ae).
• ADGM (Abu Dhabi), whose FSRA runs one of the region’s earliest spot-virtual-asset frameworks.

What matters is accountability under the law. Venom engages this requirement directly: its leadership, including CEO Christopher Louis Tsu, has publicly engaged monetary authorities, including an open letter to MAS, and the project’s current focus is regulated deployment in Southeast Asia.

Where this leaves the market

A blockchain bidding for a national mandate is no longer competing 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 the ones that close every item on this list before the first call with a regulator. That is the standard Venom is working towards: account abstraction, deterministic finality, protocol-level compliance, and native interchain messaging treated as properties of the network rather than promises about its future.

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