OFAC compliance for platform engineering

Platform engineering should build screening into shared services so every product team gets it by default.

TL;DR

TL;DR: Platform engineering makes OFAC screening a platform primitive: one shared, logged service that every team calls before moving money.

Screening as a platform service

Compliance works best when it is not left to each team to reimplement. Platform engineering can build a single screening service and expose it to every product team, so that screening is a default part of the payment path rather than a per-team decision. Centralizing avoids the drift where one team screens and another does not.

What the service exposes

The service exposes one operation: submit a counterparty, receive ALLOW or BLOCK. Under the hood it checks the 19,218 names on the SDN list and the 947 OFAC-listed crypto wallets, applies the 50 Percent Rule, and returns in under 100 ms. It logs every call with a timestamp and the outcome, giving the whole organization one audit trail.

Why centralize

Centralizing also concentrates the hard parts, such as keeping the list current, since it syncs hourly. A single integration point is easier to test and audit, and it makes the strict-liability exposure, civil penalties starting at $356,000 per violation, a solved problem for every team that routes through the platform.

Integrations for platform teams

The screening service can plug into what the platform already uses. MCP support covers AI agents, x402 covers per-check payments, and Coinbase AgentKit and Base/USDC cover the on-chain path. Because the core is one HTTP call returning ALLOW or BLOCK, wrapping it for each integration is thin.