How to read these maps.
The Atlas maps how compliance attaches to a stablecoin transaction — layer by layer, station by station, vendor by vendor. A stablecoin payment crosses seven distinct controls between intent and finality. Atlas tells you which seven, who built each one, and whether each is enforced in code or in policy.
Maps, not matrices.
Three questions, every map.
Every Atlas map answers the same three questions — in this order — for one payment route. Master these three and you can skim the rest of the site without further training.
- 1
Where does value move?
The 5-Layer Stack — Network through Application.
The architectural decomposition of one chain. Read top-down from where users touch the system to where nodes touch the wire. Application → Account → Execution → Consensus → Network; Off-Chain feeds the chain from below.
- 2
Where is it controlled?
Checkpoints — Gates, Monitors, Obligations.
Three shapes carry every control. Octagon · Gate — pre-condition, blocks. Circle · Monitor — concurrent, observes. Diamond · Obligation — post-settlement, reports. Gates accumulate before the state transition; obligations radiate after.
- 3
What enforces the control?
Code or policy; named vendor; cited authority.
Solid fill = code-enforced (the product itself blocks). Dashed outline = policy-enforced (the product issues / signals; the relying party gates). Atlas refuses generic vocabulary — Circle StableFX, not "the FX engine"; Chainalysis Reactor, not "an oracle."
Nine words, one meaning each.
The Atlas is a cartographer's project. The artifacts it returns — from /v1/kya/map to /resolve/
to every chain page — are maps of regulatory terrain, not lookup tables. The
vocabulary below is the compass: nine words you'll see across every surface,
each carrying one meaning, each pulled from the cartographer's tradition
rather than the GRC-spreadsheet tradition. When a tool here returns a map,
it is drawn on hydration, scaled to your subject, navigable on a phone.
Crosswalks and matrices belong in spreadsheets. The Atlas hands you a
map of the same terrain.
- Map.
- The artifact an Atlas evaluator returns — drawn on hydration, mobile-first, navigable. The verb is also "map": to call an evaluator against a subject.
- Chart.
- A visual surface that renders Atlas data — the page-level cousin of a map. A chart frames a question; a map answers one for a specific subject.
- Survey.
- A one-shot lookup that returns a posture summary rather than a per-waypoint verdict. Surveys are coarser than maps — they answer "where am I roughly?" not "here is every waypoint on the path."
- Waypoint.
- A discrete point along a lifecycle or journey. Waypoints fire (gates), observe (monitors), or report (obligations).
- Bearing.
- Your direction of travel through the regulatory terrain. A compliance bearing tells you whether your current posture is moving toward or away from a target framework.
- Trail.
- The record of a journey already traveled — the audit trail of evaluator calls, the trail of station transits in an STP lifecycle.
- Route.
- The chosen path between origin and destination. A rail is a route; a path is a route through a rail.
- Terrain.
- The regulatory ground itself — statutes, rules, guidance, vendor capabilities. The substrate the Atlas charts.
- Landscape.
- The high-level view of the terrain at scale — the compliance landscape, the agentic landscape, the stablecoin landscape. The Atlas exists to make these landscapes navigable rather than overwhelming.
Where you'll see it
the KYA Map at POST /v1/kya/map;
every chain page is a map of one network's compliance terrain.
Where you'll see it Chart Your Path charts the available routes through the rails; the C-Domain Matrix is the explicit exception that earns its grid framing by purpose.
Where you'll see it
the survey endpoints across /v1/ (forthcoming
siblings to the map endpoints, where a summary read is the
better shape).
Where you'll see it the five KYA waypoints (Resolve Principal, Verify Delegation, Capability Envelope, Compliance Pipeline, Credential Health) along the 10-station STP spine.
Where you'll see it the Compass surface returns a bearing when you ask "where am I in the regulatory landscape?"
Where you'll see it every map carries its trail as exportable JSON, ready for a SOC 2 attestor or a trust-bank examiner.
Where you'll see it the Agentic Rail is a route across networks; each numbered path (A1, A4, etc.) is a more specific route through it.
Where you'll see it the GENIUS Act page is a topographic survey of one important patch of terrain; the C-Domain Matrix catalogues the larger terrain it sits inside.
Where you'll see it the home page is the landscape view; every sector page narrows the landscape to one region.