These terms govern who may operate a Trading Hub on CreditChain's P2P Marketplace, and how identity verification and user data are handled when a Hub is involved. They apply to Hub operators specifically - ordinary peer-to-peer trading on the Marketplace (no Hub involved) is covered by the general Terms of Use shown at account creation.
Only users who are regulated and registered by their own government may apply to operate a Trading Hub. This exists so that each sovereign regulator can keep track of the taxable, documented trades conducted through a Hub under its jurisdiction. A Hub is a real-world operator doing business under real-world law - it is not an anonymous role.
The United States is not a supported jurisdiction. CreditChain holds no US money- transmitter/MSB license anywhere. A Trading Hub application must select its jurisdiction from a fixed list that has no "United States" option, and no application can be approved without a valid non-US jurisdiction on file - this is enforced in the protocol itself, not left to a moderator's discretion.
A Trading Hub's off-app settlement currency must be selected from a fixed list of supported real-world currencies - the US Dollar is not one of them, in any form. Facilitating USD-denominated peer-to-peer settlement is money transmission under US federal and most state law, which this platform is not licensed for. This restriction applies regardless of where a trader is located, and is enforced by the protocol itself, not a Hub's own choice.
A Trading Hub is responsible for its own identity verification of the users who trade through it, answerable to its own jurisdiction's regulator. That verification information is stored only by the Hub - never by CreditChain, and never shared across Hubs.
This keeps user data restricted to, and within, a single jurisdiction: a nation's users' identity data stays with that nation's regulated Hub, under that nation's law, rather than pooling into one central, cross-border database.
CreditChain only operates the underlying facilities - the Marketplace, escrow, matching, and on-chain settlement. CreditChain does not perform identity verification, does not hold user identity data, and does not act as a Hub itself. This keeps CreditChain the protocol fully decentralized: it is infrastructure that Hubs and traders use, not a party to the compliance relationship between a Hub and its regulator.