Back in 2013, a small group working inside the University of Miami’s entrepreneurship center saw a problem most people in finance were barely talking about.
The JOBS Act had opened the door to new forms of investment, but verifying who actually qualified as an accredited investor was messy, slow, and often manual. Adrian Alvarez and his colleagues at The Launch Pad at the University of Miami decided to build a solution themselves.
More than a decade later, that early compliance tool is becoming part of a much larger financial network.
Global Settlement announced plans to acquire Miami-based fintech companies InvestReady and Accreditoken, combining their technology into a new platform called GSX Identity. The system is designed to act as a digital credential layer for regulated blockchain finance, allowing institutions to verify participants once and then reuse those credentials across different networks and transactions.
The move comes as blockchain infrastructure is shifting away from experimental crypto trading toward regulated financial uses such as tokenized assets, cross-border payments, and central bank digital currencies.
Ryan Kirkley, CEO of Global Settlement, said the industry has spent years trying to retrofit compliance onto decentralized networks after the fact.
“Too much of the blockchain industry assumed compliance could be bolted on later,” he said, according to Investing.com. “The result has been networks regulators don’t trust. GSX Identity is being built as the trust layer for the next generation of compliant financial infrastructure.”
The main idea? Identity verification that travels with the user. Instead of repeating onboarding and compliance checks every time an investor joins a new platform or transaction, credentials can move across networks while still meeting regulatory rules such as Europe’s MiCA framework.
That identity layer is becoming a key piece of Global Settlement’s broader effort to build institutional-grade blockchain settlement rails.
The company has already been testing what those rails look like in practice. Last year, Global Settlement facilitated a $75 million acquisition of a Latin American oil and gas facility through a fully tokenized capital stack. Debt and equity were issued as digital tokens and settled in stablecoins through the company’s blockchain protocol, compressing settlement times from days into minutes.
The acquisition of InvestReady and Accreditoken adds a compliance layer built on more than a decade of work. InvestReady has verified tens of thousands of accredited investors and worked with financial platforms including Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, Securitize, Invesco, and NYDIG. Accreditoken, meanwhile, built decentralized credential infrastructure designed for blockchain systems. Together, the platforms have already minted more than 150,000 digital credentials.
Adrian Alvarez, the Miami-born attorney who co-founded InvestReady, will now lead GSX Identity as CEO, while Kirkley will serve as chairman.
What makes the story particularly notable for South Florida is how deeply it is tied to the local tech ecosystem.
Both companies involved in the deal have roots at the University of Miami. Alvarez and his co-founders launched InvestReady after working together at The Launch Pad, the university’s entrepreneurship center.
Global Settlement’s leadership has similar ties to the city. Co-founder Kyle Sonlin, a University of Miami graduate, has been building companies in Miami since 2015 and frequently lectures on blockchain and capital markets at local universities.
“Never before has a blockchain stack focused fully on providing compliant pathways for money movements,” Sonlin told Refresh Miami. “When dealing with institutional counterparties in cross-border transactions, following applicable KYC/AML laws is of the highest priority. GSX ID has the opportunity to provide accountability and transparency at a dramatically reduced cost for all parties in a transaction.”
Sonlin continued: “To have the entire engine of the InvestReady stem from inside of the University of Miami is a cool full-circle moment for us as a proud Miami company, and for me as a former Launch Pad student consultant.”
Pictured at the top of this post: Left back is Ryan Kirkley, cofounder & CEO of Global Settlement Holdings. Left front is Kyle Sonlin, cofounder & President of Global Settlement Holdings. Right back is Adrian Alvarez, CEO of GSX ID, former cofounder & CEO of InvestReady / cofounder of Accreditoken. Right front is Herwig Konings, cofounder of InvestReady / cofounder of Accreditoken.
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I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.
