GDF Early Days

GDF was conceived in 2017 by Simon Taylor and Lawrence Wintermeyer along with community colleagues, formally founded in January 2018, and incorporated as a not-for-profit company in the UK in March 2018.

GDF was run as an open innovation forum in its first year with a weekly Advisory Council meeting comprised of a leading individuals and global firms, a “coalition of the willing”, that focused on prioritizing a token taxonomy and codes of conduct for token issuers and exchanges.

In its first year, GDF convened the global community through roundtables in New York, London, and Paris, and publicly developed and ratified a token taxonomy and five codes of conduct with over 600 individual contributors from crypto firms and financial institutions. A milestone in May 2018 was supporting the OECD in its first Digital Assets Conference which convened industry, regulators and policymakers to discuss the emerging crypto and digital assets landscape.

In 2019, GDF teamed up with the Chamber of Digital Commerce and IDAXA to form a Joint Working Group, chaired by XReg Consulting, to develop the InterVASP data standard for the FATF Trave Rule, IVMS101. GDF went on to work with IDAXA to host the V20 forum with industry and the FATF.

In all, GDF produced 10 codes of conduct, known as the GDF Codes, that have now been individually retired with the highpoints from each of the codes used in the newer Global Cryptoasset Standards, a standard along with education products, now maintained by GDF and its partner the ACI FMA, the administrator of the FX Global Code.