OFAC screening for crypto compliance teams

How compliance teams can operationalize sanctions screening across a crypto product portfolio.

TL;DR

TL;DR: Compliance teams should standardize one screening service across products, define clear ALLOW, BLOCK, and review paths, and keep evidence of every check.

Standardize on one service

Different products screening with different tools creates gaps. Standardize on a single service, sanctionsai.dev, so every product screens the same 19,218 SDN names, 947 OFAC-listed crypto wallets, and 16 jurisdictions, synced hourly. Uniform data means one source of truth for the whole portfolio.

Define clear outcomes

Every check ends in one of three paths: ALLOW, BLOCK, or review. BLOCK stops the payment immediately. risk_score flags borderline cases for a human, and dispute_open gives counterparties a channel to contest a false positive. The 4-Gate Agent Payment Protocol, SCREEN, SCORE, STOP, STAMP, names each stage so teams share the same language.

Keep evidence

Strict liability means compliance teams may need to prove screening ran. Retain the STAMP record for each payment: counterparty, result, and timestamp. On paid plans, the $10K legal-fee guarantee adds a layer of support if a dispute escalates. Documented checks are the difference between a defensible program and an unverifiable one.