Basic Information
Project Name: Circle Finance
Project Track: infra-security
Team Name: Digital Flow PTE LTD
Team Members: Anton Butser - CEO, Roman Dubina - CTO
Social Info
Telegram: [@tonybuter]
Website: https://circl.finance | App: https://app.circl.finance
Project Overview
Project Goal: Circl Finance is continuous internal audit for organizations that run payroll, contractor payments and treasury on-chain. We are already live on TRON. A company registers the wallets it wants audited - employees, contractors, treasury - and we re-test every transaction on them against 8 explicit internal-control rules every hour, producing auditor-grade evidence for each exception. This grant funds a 90-day program to (1) deepen TRON-native audit coverage, (2) run free continuous internal audit for named TRON DeFi treasuries and TBL participants, and (3) publish a public TRON treasury internal-control benchmark.
Unique Value Proposition:
Internal audit, not perimeter security. This is not AML screening, not sanctions screening, and not wallet/phishing protection. Those defend the perimeter - they ask whether an external counterparty is risky. Internal audit asks a different question: is someone inside the organization - a procurement manager, a payroll admin, a treasury signer - taking money? That question can only be answered from the organization’s own payment graph, not from a blocklist.
Why this is unsolved on-chain. Off-chain, this function is mature: segregation of duties, four-eyes approval, continuous controls monitoring, an internal audit function reporting to the audit committee. On-chain payroll and treasury have none of it. A DAO or crypto-paid company can see every transaction and still have no control that asks “did this contractor payment loop back to the person who approved it?” Occupational fraud is the largest uncontrolled cost most organizations carry, and on-chain it is currently monitored by nobody.
The 8 controls we run continuously, mapped to classic internal-audit risk: corruption and conflict of interest (kickback, hidden client, self-dealing), payroll fraud (ghost employee, shadow payroll), and control circumvention (round-trip, split payment, new wallet). Each is an explicit, human-readable rule with tunable thresholds - not a machine-learning score. Every exception ships with the exact transaction hashes and the full path through every intermediary wallet, traced up to 3 wallets deep, and still fires when 99% of the value is lost to fees along the way.
Audit-grade output, not just alerts. Every exception carries a review workflow (new → reviewing → resolved or dismissed) with reviewer notes and no auto-resolution, so there is a defensible audit trail of who looked at what. Findings can be assembled into case files with rated evidence and shared read-only with outside counsel, an auditor, or a Big Four engagement team. Exports are PDF for auditors and JSON for engineers.
What it replaces: today this only gets done as a Big Four forensic engagement - roughly six weeks and $200K+ for a single point-in-time PDF, re-engaged each time something is suspected. Circl runs the same control tests every hour, continuously, and hands the forensic team better evidence when they are engaged. We do not replace the auditor; we make the auditor’s work continuous and cheap.
Why this matters for TRON: TRON settles the majority of global stablecoin volume - USDT on TRON exceeds $90B in supply with over $4.2T in YTD transfer volume. That makes TRON the default payroll and treasury rail for crypto-paid organizations worldwide, and therefore the chain carrying the largest concentration of unaudited internal payment risk. Bringing a real internal-audit layer to TRON is a direct governance upgrade for every DAO, studio and treasury on the network. Read-only, no key access, no custody - we only read public on-chain data for the wallets a company lists.
Project Demo: Live product, verifiable in 5 minutes - Circl — Crypto Fraud Detection - run one free audit pass over any set of TRON wallets (25 wallets, all 8 controls, PDF + JSON report). Point it at a real treasury and read the exceptions. Per-control documentation: Docs — Circle Finance
Expected Completion Date: 90 days from grant approval. Ongoing monitoring and benchmark updates beyond.
Current Progress: Live in production on TRON and Ethereum. Real-time ingest (~2s latency), 1-year+ retention, hourly re-testing of all 8 controls. All 8 controls shipped and tunable; flow tracing (3 hops), case files and smart muting live in-product. Paying customers today: 10, currently auditing 1000+ wallets across TRON and Ethereum; Overall project progress: ~70% - production pipeline and paying customers live; TRON-specific deepening and ecosystem rollout remaining.
Technical & Governance Details
Project Test Instructions:
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Go to Circl — Crypto Fraud Detection and run the free audit pass on any set of TRON wallets
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Register employee / contractor / treasury wallets (read-only - addresses only, no keys).
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Receive exceptions naming the exact transactions, wallets and the path between them; work the review queue; export as PDF or JSON.
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Technical Details: Real-time block ingest on TRON and Ethereum; column-store query engine; rule-based control testing re-run hourly against all registered wallets. Tokens covered include USDT, USDC and TRX (plus DAI, WBTC, ETH on Ethereum). Each control has tunable thresholds (retention %, time windows, minimum amounts, hop count) set per organization. No ML score - every exception is reproducible from underlying on-chain history, which is what makes it usable as audit evidence. Output: exception with transaction hashes, full wallet path, severity and review state, exportable as JSON or PDF.
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TRON-specific work funded by this grant:
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Cross-chain analytics - extending flow tracing across chains so control tests still follow funds that leave TRON and come back through other networks.
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TRON resource-model abuse as an internal-control risk (energy farming, bandwidth exhaustion, delegation abuse) - a treasury cost centre that is currently unaudited.
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Deeper TRON DeFi context (JustLend, SunSwap, USDD flow semantics) so tracing does not mis-flag legitimate protocol hops as circumvention.
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Integration hardening with TRON RPC providers (TronGrid / GetBlock) for treasury-scale throughput.
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A TRON treasury control framework: a documented, reusable set of internal-audit controls any TRON DAO or studio can adopt.
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Smart Contract Links: Not applicable. Circl is off-chain audit infrastructure, not on-chain contracts. It reads public TRON transaction data for the wallets an organization registers; it does not deploy or custody contracts.
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How is the Project Governed?: Centralized by Digital Flow PTE LTD.
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Funding & Business Model
Funding Request: $180,000 USDT or USDD over 90 days, milestone-gated.
Tranche 1 - $90,000 - trigger: grant approval - use of funds: TRON-specific control tuning, TronGrid/GetBlock integration hardening, TRON DeFi context for tracing.
Tranche 2 - $90,000 - trigger: Milestone 4 delivery (treasury-scale TRON monitoring hardened end-to-end) - use of funds: TRON resource-abuse control library, free continuous internal audit for named TRON DeFi treasuries and TBL participants, published TRON treasury control framework and benchmark.
Revenue Model: One free audit pass, then subscription - Starter $500/mo (TRON, 25 wallets), Pro $2,500/mo (TRON + Ethereum, 150 wallets, hourly + on-demand), Enterprise custom. Billing is already crypto-native: USDT on TRON/Ethereum is the default, with SEPA/SWIFT invoicing on request.
Interested in TRON Having a Stake?: Yes. Open to staking grant TRX into TRON validators and/or energy provisioning for the hosted scanner, aligning company incentives with long-term TRON ecosystem performance and signalling durable commitment beyond a single grant cycle.
Preferred Collaboration Method: Direct grant plus co-marketing with TRON DAO when deepened TRON coverage ships. We would also like to contribute the TRON treasury control framework to TRON developer documentation and TBL onboarding, so every incoming project starts with a baseline internal-control checklist. Open to integration partnerships with TRON RPC providers (TronGrid, GetBlock) and TRON-native payroll and treasury tooling teams.
Ecosystem Impact
Partnerships: Committed free continuous internal audit on grant approval - named TRON DeFi treasuries subject to TRON DAO coordination (JustLend, SunSwap), top TRC20 stablecoin and DeFi treasuries by TVL, and 5+ TBL-program participants of TRON DAO’s choice. For TBL specifically this is directly useful to the program itself: grant funds released to projects are exactly the kind of flow that internal-audit controls are designed to verify. Existing paying customers available for reference checks on request.
Time on TRON: Already live on TRON with paying customers. This grant funds deeper TRON-native coverage plus ecosystem rollout (free internal audit for TRON treasuries and a published control framework).
Project Milestones
Milestone 1 - Day 21 - TRON-specific TRC20 fee handling in control tests - Planned
Milestone 2 - Day 35 - TRON DeFi context (JustLend/SunSwap/USDD) integrated into flow tracing - Planned
Milestone 3 - Day 50 - TRON resource-abuse control library (energy/bandwidth/delegation) - Planned
Milestone 4 - Day 60 - TronGrid/GetBlock treasury-scale monitoring integration hardened - Planned
Milestone 5 - Day 75 - Free continuous internal audit delivered to named TRON treasuries + 5 TBL projects - Planned
Milestone 6 - Day 90 - Published TRON treasury internal-control framework + public benchmark report - Planned
We will post forum updates as each milestone lands.
Project in 5 Years: By 2031, Circl is the internal-audit layer for on-chain organizations - the control function that any DAO, studio or crypto-paid company is expected to have before it moves real payroll and treasury on-chain. Integrated into TRON payroll and treasury tooling, feeding evidence straight into auditor and legal workflows, with a published control framework that becomes the default governance baseline for TRON treasuries, and operating a TRON validator that returns a share of revenue to the ecosystem.
The Ask in One Paragraph: We are requesting $180,000 over 90 days under TBL’s Infrastructure & Security track to bring continuous internal audit to TRON. Every organization running payroll and treasury on TRON has the control gap that off-chain finance solved decades ago with segregation of duties and an internal audit function - and on-chain it is currently monitored by nobody. Circl closes it with 8 explicit control tests, re-run hourly, each exception backed by exact on-chain transactions and a defensible review trail. This is internal audit, not AML or wallet security. We are already live on TRON with paying customers, and will deliver free continuous audit to named TRON treasuries plus a published control framework the whole ecosystem can adopt.
Try it in 5 minutes: Circl — Crypto Fraud Detection