Newrl, a leading public blockchain for mainstream decentralized finance (DeFi), has announced KYC integration solutions for public blockchains in a first globally. Newrl will now enable compliance for businesses and regulators by removing the anonymity on blockchains. This opens the doors for typical businesses to start embracing blockchain to improve their processes and expand their markets.
The solution is built in a manner where businesses don’t have to necessarily integrate the KYC solution within their own application which relieves them from any security concerns. Users themselves will be responsible for keeping KYC records and information in their database for frequent and easy access. The information is readily available for existing and new businesses, by requesting users to provide temporary “view-only” access. Even from the consumer perspective, the process has been simplified where they don’t have to verify their KYC multiple times.
No other blockchain at present enforces KYC norms at the chain level. Owing to their libertarian foundation starting with Bitcoin, most public blockchains are built on the premise of anonymity. While this avoids the censorship, it also opens these chains to abuse by money launderers and terrorist financiers.
Newrl addresses concerns by incorporating digital fingerprints of KYC documents (called “hashes”) for each wallet on it, along with information about the jurisdiction of the owner. The wallet owner is required to either use a centralised authentication service or use a non-custodial wallet application to ensure authenticity of the KYC documents. Actual documents, and information like name and tax-id, however, are not public. In this way, Newrl manages to maintain privacy while still ensuring adherence to KYC/AML norms.
Swapnil Pawar, Founder, Newrl
Commenting on the development, Swapnil Pawar, the Founder of Newrl said, “In recent years, several important milestones have been achieved in the fight against black money – through the efforts of institutions like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It is important to not lose ground to the money laundering ecosystems through purely anonymous transactions on blockchains. The identity at the chain layer brought in by Newrl is aimed at ensuring that mainstream use of blockchain is compliant with KYC/AML norms.”
About Newrl
Newrl is a ‘Trust Network’ blockchain built for decentralized social finance founded by Swapnil Pawar. Swapnil has over 18 years of experience in the intersection of technology and financial services. He is an IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad graduate and is an expert in the field of blockchain technology, macroeconomics, decentralized finance and quantitative investing.
The company enables individuals and small businesses to access capital from their communities using their credibility and tokenized assets as a collateral. Newrl simplifies legally robust tokenization of assets like stocks, properties, and startup equity. It also enables individuals and small businesses to tokenize new forms of assets like personal creditworthiness, social media revenue inflows, patents, invoices, brands, warehouse receipts, etc. For illiquid assets, Newrl supports a mutualization mechanism to facilitate liquidity, also helping their use as collateral in a loan. Newrl focusses more upon real-world assets, with backing from physical assets which reduces the scope of many types of fraud (eg. double lien frauds, etc.), furthering the belief in the ‘trust network’.
Website – newrl.net.
