Global vLEI Hackathon: How Digital Organizational Identity Shapes the Future of Onchain Finance
Shaping the future of digital organizational identity together. In this guest blog, Fernando Vazquez, President of Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs, highlights how the Global vLEI Hackathon at SmartCon 2025 showcases the pivotal role of digital and verifiable organizational identity in powering compliant digital assets, advancing automated compliance, and building trust infrastructure for onchain finance.
Author: Fernando Vazquez, President, Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs
Date: 2025-10-08
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SmartCon, the flagship Chainlink conference and cornerstone of New York Blockchain Week, returns to New York City on November 4-5, bringing together leaders from banking and capital markets, government, and DeFi to chart the next phase of onchain finance.
A central theme of this year’s event is trusted digital identity, with a special focus on this in the Global vLEI Hackathon. Winners will showcase their solutions on November 3, kicking off the week to highlight how verifiable organizational identity can unlock compliant digital assets and power the future of digital trust. That focus ties directly into Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) - a modular suite of compliance services that enables Financial Institutions, Financial Monetary Institutions, and Market Infrastructures to enforce policies (KYC/AML, jurisdictional rules), manage verifiable identities such as the vLEI, and monitor/report activity across public and permissioned chains. Together, vLEI and ACE point to an emerging trust infrastructure for global markets: verifiable identity at the organizational level, enforced by programmable policy and interoperable across chains.
Why did Chainlink choose to spotlight the vLEI through the Global vLEI Hackathon at SmartCon 2025?
The vLEI is a foundational building block for trusted markets. It’s the verifiable, cryptographic counterpart to the globally adopted Legal Entity Identifier standard—now usable directly in digital interactions and transactions. By integrating vLEIs with Chainlink’s ACE, we can tie organizational identity and authorized signers directly to the rules a smart contract enforces. Showcasing the hackathon at SmartCon puts that vision in front of the community that’s actively building the next generation of market infrastructure—developers, institutions, and regulators. With support from major institutions like Swift, the hackathon serves as a proving ground for solutions that connect traditional finance with the digital asset economy.
What kinds of solutions or innovations do you hope the hackathon participants will explore, and how do these align with the future of secure digital assets and identity?
We’d love to see practical, high-impact demos using vLEIs as the trust anchor across the hackathon’s three tracks: 1. digital assets and financial infrastructure; 2. industry and finance operations; and 3. trade and supply chain. Examples include:
Tokenized funds & securities: Wallets bound to organizational credentials; pre-trade eligibility checks; jurisdiction-aware transfer controls.
Institutional DeFi rails: Dynamic access control, such as automatically limiting who can interact with a protocol based on their organizational role, jurisdiction, or trading history.
Trade finance & supply chains: Automated verification of corporate roles and authorities for e-signatures, purchase orders, and payments.
These are precisely the workflows Chainlink ACE is designed to accelerate, including policy enforcement in smart contracts, verifiable entity identity via vLEIs, and cross-chain monitoring/reporting that institutions need.
From your perspective, what makes the vLEI a game-changer for digital compliance and trust automation?
Two things. First, verifiability: a vLEI is a cryptographically secure credential tied to the ISO LEI standard, with role attestations for individuals authorized to act on behalf of an organization. This enables peer-to-peer verification, eliminating the need for manual checks or intermediaries, allowing identity to be proven within automated workflows. Second, governance and interoperability: the LEI system is globally governed and already embedded in financial regulation. The vLEI extends that trust into programmable, cross-platform contexts, which is precisely what automated compliance needs to scale and bring compliance onchain.
How does integrating the vLEI with Chainlink's Automated Compliance Engine help advance the goal of bringing institutional capital onchain?
Institutions require three assurances to move large amounts of capital onchain: the right identity, proper rules, and adequate auditability.
With ACE’s Identity Manager and Cross-Chain Identity (CCID) framework, institutions can link wallets to verifiable credentials like vLEIs without putting sensitive data onchain.
With the Policy Manager and compliance extensions, they can codify KYC/AML and jurisdictional rules directly into tokens and protocols—so eligibility is enforced before transactions execute.
With Monitoring & Reporting, they can generate alerts and detailed activity logs across chains for regulatory and internal review.
The vLEI supplies a globally recognized organizational identity; ACE operationalizes it across public and private blockchains.
Chainlink and GLEIF recently showcased this combination at Swift’s 2025 Hackathon, where it was selected as the winning solution. We successfully demonstrated the delivery of digital asset tokens in exchange for payment over Swift, all while supporting compliance policies—a critical prerequisite for institutional capital to move onchain at scale.
What role do you see decentralized organizational identity playing in the broader digital economy, and why is now the right time for global stakeholders to engage?
Organizational identity is becoming the connective tissue of the digital economy.
Tokenization, programmable money, and automated operations all depend on knowing which legal entities are interacting, what they’re permitted to do, and how to prove it reliably across jurisdictions and chains. Decentralized, verifiable credentials like the vLEI, combined with ACE’s policy and monitoring capabilities, give us a path to a reusable, privacy-preserving identity that travels with transactions and scales across ecosystems. With industry partners rallying behind initiatives like the GLEIF vLEI hackathon and winners presenting at venues like SmartCon, along with Swift recognizing the impact of Chainlink’s solution in its own hackathon and selecting it as a winner, momentum is accelerating. It’s the right moment for regulators, financial institutions, and builders to align on shared standards and bring trusted, compliant markets onchain.
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Fernando is the President, Capital Markets, of Chainlink. Fernando began his academic journey in the early 90s, when he became deeply involved with the emerging Linux community. This led him into the corporate world, where he held several roles at the NTT Group, starting in 2003, and contributed to the mainstreaming of open source. He transitioned into the FinTech world, joining Japanese financial conglomerate SBI in 2016, where he held several roles, including CEO of SBI Digital Asset Holdings, a pioneer in digital capital markets, and founding member of Project Guardian. He also serves on the boards of regulated financial institutions and foundations globally and is a member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's International Technology Advisory Panel.
