Travel Rule

The Travel Rule is a compliance requirement under which information about the sender and the recipient must "travel" alongside a transfer of value. Applied to crypto, it means that when one regulated service sends assets to another on a customer's behalf, identifying details such as names, account or wallet references and, in some cases, addresses must be shared securely with the receiving institution. The rule originates in international anti-money-laundering standards for wire transfers and was extended to virtual assets so that transfers between regulated intermediaries are not anonymous end to end. In practice, exchanges use specialised messaging networks to exchange this data, and may ask users to declare who owns a self-hosted wallet before releasing a withdrawal.