Discovery sub-layer

Focus: Discovering permitted participants and networks. Identifying, verifying, and establishing trusted connections with compliant participating entities across different blockchains.

Objective: Enable regulated discovery and connections. Facilitate nodes, services, or entities from various compliant blockchains to discover, verify, and interact with each other in a regulated environment, ensuring trustworthiness and adherence to regulatory standards.

Description: In a regulated crosschain environment, not all connections are treated equally. The Discovery Layer goes beyond just finding other nodes or services; it ensures that these discovered entities adhere to the necessary regulatory standards and are trustworthy. This might involve verifying credentials, checking regulatory compliance status, or assessing reputation. Especially in a regulated context, it's crucial to ensure that any entity you connect with won't compromise your compliance status or introduce risks. This layer integrates mechanisms for such verification, ensuring that crosschain operations occur within the bounds of regulatory requirements. Defines protocols for nodes to discover and identify approved counterparties for cross-chain activities in a regulated environment. Discovery Layer in ensuring that crosschain interactions in regulated settings are not just technically feasible, but also compliant and trustworthy.

Layer owner:

Some key aspects could be:

• Discovery of licensed/regulated entities based on attestations

• Filtering and permissioning discovery based on regulatory metadata

• Standardized registration and discovery of identified participants

• Exchange of compliance-related credentials and qualifications

• Auditing and visibility into discovery activity

• Preventing unregulated interconnectivity

• Aligning with regulated identity schemes

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• Nodes should be able to discover and validate the identity of participants on other chains. This allows for compliance with KYC, AML regulations.

• The discovery process should facilitate auditing and attribution of cross-chain activities to real-world entities. This enables oversight and accountability.

• Nodes should be able to discover certified/licensed blockchain networks and deny connecting to unregulated ones. This prevents illegal interoperability.

• Discovery should allow the filtering of nodes based on metadata like jurisdiction, regulatory status, and compliance certification. This ensures compatible chains can interconnect.

• Chains should be able to restrict discoverability and connections based on regulatory approval. This provides controlled interoperability per governance policies.

• Discovery protocols should facilitate the exchange of compliance-related credentials and attestations between chains.

• Standardized registration and discovery of legally identified participants, networks, assets, and schemas should be supported.

Node Registry:

Discovery Protocol: