Skip to content
Blockchain

Why do I have to re-prove my identity at every regulated app?

80

Opportunity

Every exchange, lending protocol, and DeFi front-end requires a full KYC document submission even when you passed the same check last week at a competitor. Your passport scan ends up distributed across dozens of custodians, each a separate breach liability. Zero-knowledge KYC proofs can verify compliance claims without re-sharing raw documents, but no interoperable standard binds them to FATF-compliant audit trails. MiCA 2026 explicitly calls for reusable identity proofs for CASP licensing yet specifies no technical format. The gap between regulatory expectation and a working portable attestation primitive is still wide open.

Why it matters

A standardized ZK-KYC attestation would collapse identity onboarding friction, shrink the breach surface, and let a user's compliance history travel with them rather than being re-captured at every door.

How I score the opportunity

The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.

Severity8/10

How much pain it causes when it shows up.

Frequency8/10

How often people actually run into it.

Whitespace7/10

How little good tooling exists for it today.

More problems worth solving