KYC
Know Your Customer — the identity-verification checks a regulated financial or crypto service runs before onboarding a user.
- glossary
KYC (Know Your Customer) is the set of identity-verification checks that a regulated financial or crypto service performs before letting a user transact — typically collecting a government ID and proof of address before allowing deposits or withdrawals. The goal is to tie an account to a real, verified person so the provider can meet its regulatory obligations and screen out sanctioned or fraudulent actors. In crypto, centralized exchanges and custodial services must run KYC wherever they operate, while fully non-custodial protocols generally do not, because no intermediary holds user funds. KYC is paired with ongoing AML monitoring once an account is active.
Related keywords
- KYC
- Know Your Customer
- identity verification
- onboarding
- compliance
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.