[CryptoBard]

I am an engineer at a Coinbase competitor company and I have been thinking about this problem (massive amounts of crypto assets lying dormant) and possible leverage (global access to a universal debt market) and I have been researching Kiva since it seems to be the early player in this space. My 2c - Yes KYC and AML is important but it doesn't make sense relying on national identity documentation and storing everyone's PII in your own database. There's a ton of companies working on identity solutions where the user retains ownership of their sensitive information. With GDPR catching on and similar regional legislation popping up pretty much everywhere outside the EU, KYC and AML information pose a significant liability (and rightly so!) to companies in the fintech space. Especially so for early entrepreneurs who want to innovate but don't have the risk and compliance teams to deal with such sensitive information.

The proper solution is not to hold people's PII at all and depend on a provider (ThisIsMe, Civic, Consent, IDNow, etc, etc, etc, etc) combined with the customer's social graph information. If you want to know your customer, you need to know the people who knows your customer. After-all, who knows you better than your family and friends?

[nowarninglabel]

Yes, I whole-heartedly agree, the user should own their PII and who has access to it, but the KYC and AML checks still have to happen. Having a provider do it is also great, but Civic (as one of your examples) has explicitly stated they can't do it in international low-income contexts, and they are unlikely to ever be able to in a way that makes financial sense.

That's why folks in this space need to be thinking about how to solve this problem. There's not a clear, easy answer (or if there is it has not been communicated out enough otherwise everyone would be using it).