Customer Verification in Crypto: What You Need to Know About KYC, Identity, and Compliance

When you sign up for a crypto exchange, you're not just creating an account—you're going through customer verification, the process of proving your identity to comply with financial laws. Also known as KYC, it's the reason you upload a photo of your ID, take a selfie, or answer questions about your finances. This isn't just bureaucracy—it's the backbone of trust in a space that once claimed to be anonymous.

Behind every KYC crypto, the system exchanges use to confirm your identity before letting you trade is a web of rules called AML crypto, anti-money laundering regulations that force platforms to track suspicious activity. These rules aren't optional. If an exchange skips them, banks cut them off—like what happened to crypto firms in India before the Supreme Court ruling in 2020. Even decentralized platforms like Omni Exchange V3 and SunSwap V3, which boast "no KYC," still face pressure to comply or lose access to fiat gateways. Meanwhile, exchanges like Millionero and Bitbuy lean into compliance as a selling point, showing you can have security without sacrificing access.

But not all verification is the same. Some projects, like Humanode, are trying something radical: replacing passwords and IDs with blockchain identity, a system where your face or fingerprint becomes your digital key. Instead of uploading documents, you scan your biometrics to prove you're one real person—one node, one vote. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step toward identity verification, a way to confirm who you are without handing over your address, birth date, or government ID. That’s the same idea behind privacy-preserving identity verification, where zero-knowledge proofs let you prove you’re over 18 or a resident of a country without revealing your actual details.

What you’ll find in these posts isn’t just a list of exchanges that do or don’t require ID. It’s a look at how verification shapes everything—from whether you can trade in Ecuador or Russia, to why airdrops like E2P Token or OKFLY turn out to be scams. It’s why some tokens vanish: no team, no identity, no accountability. And it’s why the most trusted platforms today aren’t the ones with the flashiest apps—they’re the ones that can prove they know who their users are, without compromising their safety.