What is Passage?

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The parties in an offer

Every offer on Passage involves three parties.

• Your platform (distribution partner). You own the user relationship and the front-end experience. Your users discover and access assets inside your app.
• Passage. Passage sits between you and the asset issuers, and handles authentication, KYC and eligibility, allowlists, compliance, purchase rails, and settlement.
• Asset issuers. Issuers create the underlying assets and set the requirements attached to each one. Some are tokenization platforms such as Superstate and Ondo; others issue directly, such as WisdomTree and CoinList.

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What the end user experiences

Sign in, qualify, invest, receive. The user authenticates through Passage via OAuth inside your app, completes eligibility checks, invests in the offer, and receives assets to a wallet they control. Users always stay inside your product.

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What you build vs. what Passage handles

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Who holds the money?

The user. Passage is not a custodian and not a broker. We never take custody of your users’ funds or assets, and we have no ability to move, freeze, or recover them. What Passage is, is a secure and audited transaction layer. We verify that a user is eligible, then coordinate the transaction between the user and the asset issuer through a funding smart contract that belongs to that specific offering. For a tokenized stock purchase, that looks like this. The user authorizes the payment amount from their own wallet. Passage confirms they are eligible for that asset. The funds settle through the offering’s funding contract to the issuer. The issuer delivers the tokens to the wallet the user controls. At no point do the funds or the assets pass through a Passage account. The smart contracts involved in money movement have been audited by Oak Security and are publicly available at github.com/coinlist/on-chain.

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Do my users need a separate account with each issuer?

Your users verify once through Passage, and that verified identity carries across issuers and offerings. In some cases, accounts may be created directly with the issuer or tokenization platform on their behalf. When this is true, all of this information is fully disclosed to the user prior to investing, and Passage handles the entire process without redirecting the user to a third-party platform. Individual offerings may have unique requirements, a tax form for example, and when that happens Passage collects it inside the same flow rather than sending your user somewhere else.

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Do I have to build my own UI?

You control the user experience in your app, and that is the point. You know what your users like and how they want to invest, so the front end is yours to design. Passage provides the APIs and rails underneath, along with some ready-made SDK components if you want a head start. We do the heavy lifting on the back end. Hooking it up is quick.

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See it running

The partner demo is a working integration you can read and run, covering OAuth, offers, eligibility, and both purchase flows end to end.