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When Ceridwen Choo speaks about the future of finance, it’s not with the cautious tone of a banker hedging bets. It’s with the conviction of a builder who’s seen both sides of the system. As CEO and co-founder of Cleanverse International, Choo is on a mission to make blockchain not just innovative, but accountable; a rare combination in a space often defined by hype and volatility.
“Finance doesn’t naturally evolve,” she says. “It changes when regulators and innovators come together with purpose. Open banking forced that change once, and blockchain will do it again.”
Choo’s career has been a study in transformation. After leading digital payment innovation at Diners Club Singapore (DCS), she found herself at the crossroads of a 50-year-old institution trying to reinvent itself for the digital era. There, she spearheaded DCS Innov, a spin-off that introduced cards-as-a-service and even piloted one of Singapore’s first payment tokens, before most banks had even uttered the word ‘stablecoin’.
That experiment became the seed for Cleanverse. “We realised tokenisation could do more than move money faster. It could move trust,” Choo recalls. “The question was: how do you replicate the regulatory confidence of traditional finance inside decentralised systems?”
Cleanverse was created to answer that question.
At its core, Cleanverse is a compliance-native infrastructure – a term Choo coined to describe systems where regulatory safeguards aren’t bolted on later, but baked in from the start. The company’s twin innovations: A-Pass and A-Token, form the foundation of this approach.
A-Pass acts as a verified identity credential, not by repeating KYC checks, but by authenticating existing ones across jurisdictions through open banking integrations. Meanwhile, A-Token functions as a programmable wrapper that guarantees the provenance of on-chain assets to ensure every transaction is traceable, redeemable and compliant.
Together, they form what Choo calls the “trust fabric” of Cleanverse, a digital parallel to the accountability of the SWIFT network, but built for the decentralised web.
“Every value transfer should carry two certainties,” she explains. “Who sent it, and whether the asset is clean. That’s what A-Pass and A-Token ensure.”
A new standard for regulated on-chain finance
Cleanverse isn’t trying to invent new financial standards. It is trying to translate the existing ones into a Web3 world that has outgrown its anarchic roots.
“We didn’t create a new rulebook,” Choo stresses. “We simply brought forward the baseline standards that have governed finance for decades, and made them work in an environment where self-custody replaces institutional control.”
That distinction is crucial. In TradFi, banks carry institutional accountability; in decentralised systems, individuals control their own assets. Cleanverse bridges that gap by turning compliance from a centralised burden into a distributed responsibility, anchored in verifiable credentials and auditable tokens.
This principle is not just theoretical. It directly addresses one of the biggest regulatory challenges of the decade: how to know who holds a stablecoin at any point in time.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s 2024 ordinance requires issuers to maintain real-time visibility into stablecoin ownership – a requirement few blockchain companies can currently meet. Cleanverse’s architecture, however, was designed for it. “Our system already satisfies that rule,” Choo says. “It’s proof that compliance and decentralisation don’t have to be opposites.”
From Singapore to the world
Headquartered in Singapore, Cleanverse reflects the city-state’s dual identity as both financial hub and innovation sandbox. Choo describes Singapore as the ideal launchpad for regulated Web3 infrastructure, yet she’s also clear-eyed about the limits.
“Being made in Singapore gives you integrity,” she says. “But to scale, you must be relevant in the U.S. – that’s where standards get tested and legitimised globally.”
Expansion plans are already under way. Cleanverse is setting its sights on Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong – markets where tokenised assets and stablecoin regulations are advancing rapidly; and on partnerships in the U.S. to anchor its compliance-tech framework in the world’s largest capital market.
Collaboration as currency
If compliance is the architecture, collaboration is the currency of Cleanverse’s growth. The company has already teamed up with dtcpay and Fomo Group, two of Asia’s most active on- and off-ramp providers, to embed A-Pass and A-Token into real-world payment flows. It is also working with banks participating in MAS’s Project Guardian and Project Orchid to explore tokenised deposits and regulated DeFi pilots.
Choo views these alliances not as optional add-ons, but as ecosystem-building necessities. “In the next evolution of finance, no one succeeds alone,” she says. “Banks, fintechs and blockchain companies each hold part of the solution. Cleanverse exists to make those parts interoperable and trustworthy.”
Despite the technical sophistication of her work, Choo returns repeatedly to a human theme: confidence. “Technology doesn’t build confidence, transparency does,” she says. “If users and regulators can see how things work, they don’t have to believe; they can verify.”
That belief extends to her own leadership philosophy. A veteran of Mastercard and Railsbank, she learned that innovation rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails because of organisational inertia. “When I led tokenisation at DCS, half the room thought I was crazy,” she recalls with a laugh. “But the only way to bring people along is to make them comfortable with change. You explain, you involve, and you prove.”
Why Cleanverse matters now
The timing for Cleanverse could not be sharper. As AI agents begin to make autonomous financial decisions (from booking travel to executing investments), the need for verifiable, compliant, machine-to-machine payments is becoming urgent.
Choo sees Web3 as the natural substrate for this future. “AI payments will never happen on Web2,” she predicts. “They’ll happen on blockchain, where every action is recorded and accountability can be programmed.”
In that future, Cleanverse’s infrastructure could become the invisible layer that ensures every digital agent, wallet or token can transact under the same rules of trust that govern TradFi today.
From vision to standard
Cleanverse plans to expand its consortium model, inviting banks, fintechs and stablecoin issuers to participate as members that co-govern updates to the protocol. “No one entity should control the standard,” Choo says. “The ecosystem must evolve by consensus, just like the banking system once did.”
Choo knows that bridging TradFi and DeFi isn’t about erasing one world for another. It’s about alignment. “Finance has always been about trust,” she says. “Cleanverse simply gives that trust a new digital form.”
In a landscape cluttered with speculative noise, Cleanverse offers a visionary reminder: the future of finance won’t be built by those who move fast and break things, but by those who move fast and make things accountable.
