CLARITY Compliance: Custody Attestations for Digital Assets
Onchain trading venues produce a complete record of every transaction. The structural advantage of that openness over traditional markets, where surveillance has to be reconstructed from venue feeds, broker reports, and regulatory data calls, is largely used today by people studying the markets after the fact. The continuous, venue-by-venue surveillance institutional capital and regulators expect from a registered trading venue runs on a different cadence than block explorers and analytics dashboards deliver.
CLARITY, if enacted in something close to its current form, would bring digital asset trading platforms into a registration framework with explicit market integrity obligations: surveillance for manipulative trading, recordkeeping for every order and execution, and disclosures designed for both regulators and counterparties. The data needed to meet those obligations is already onchain. Turning it into evidence a venue can produce on demand is the work that closes the gap between the data being public and the data being usable.
Open data that's still hard to audit at venue scale
Onchain market surveillance today happens in three places, and none of them produces what a registered venue needs. Block explorers and analytics platforms cover the broad market and serve research and investigation, with a focus on historical reconstruction rather than venue-level monitoring. Individual venues run their own internal surveillance against their own order books and execution records, with each venue's view bounded by what its system sees. Sector-wide infrastructure for cross-venue, real-time integrity monitoring, the kind that a national securities exchange runs against its order flow, has only begun to take shape onchain.
The result is a market with more transparent raw data than any traditional venue has ever offered, and less consolidated surveillance over that data than registered venues are required to maintain. A wash trade visible to anyone with a block explorer and an hour to spend can pass unflagged in the surveillance a registered venue would be required to maintain. A spoofing pattern across two DEXes can be detected by a specialist looking for it after the fact, with neither venue's internal monitoring picking it up at the moment it happened.
For a trading venue preparing for registration, or an institution evaluating where to route flow, the gap matters. Compliance with market integrity rules requires evidence of continuous monitoring and the ability to produce surveillance records on demand, in formats regulators can verify. Pulling that evidence together after the fact from chain data is possible but expensive, and the resulting reports still ask everyone reading them to trust the analyst's reconstruction.
Surveillance that produces proof, not just alerts
Verifiable market surveillance treats the surveillance output as evidence rather than analysis. Every order, execution, and cancellation visible onchain, every position change across linked venues, every cross-venue arbitrage pattern that connects them, becomes part of a queryable record that produces cryptographic proof for every result.
Space and Time runs that record. It indexes order flow and execution data across the venues that matter, runs the integrity queries the venue's compliance function needs to answer, and produces proof for every output. The same infrastructure surfaces the manipulation patterns a venue's surveillance team monitors for and generates the audit-grade documentation a regulator would ask for in an inquiry, drawn from one verifiable source rather than reconstructed from logs after a request lands.
The change is that surveillance becomes a continuous output of the venue's own operations, with the work shifting from a separately staffed compliance workstream into infrastructure the market already runs on. The same data that proves the venue is running cleanly under normal conditions becomes the evidence record when something is flagged. Regulators get a verifiable view of the venue's market integrity, and counterparties evaluating where to route flow get execution quality and integrity evidence they can check for themselves.
Integrity that registered venues can document
For venues preparing for the registration framework CLARITY would create, verifiable surveillance turns a compliance program built on assertions into one built on evidence. The recordkeeping, monitoring, and disclosure obligations a registered venue takes on become outputs of the same data infrastructure that runs the market, and institutional traders evaluating where to route flow get execution quality, liquidity claims, and integrity history they can check directly.
The structural advantage of having every transaction visible finally translates into the surveillance the registered-venue framework actually needs. The transparency that has always been theoretically available becomes the operational basis of how integrity gets documented.
Market integrity and surveillance is one of the four areas covered by the CLARITY Compliance Framework by Space and Time, the data blockchain securing onchain finance.
