KYA (Know Your Address)
KYA, or Know Your Address, is the practice of assessing the risk profile of a specific blockchain address itself — its history, labels, and behavior — independent of who legally owns it. It is address-centric screening, distinct from customer-centric KYC.
KYA (Know Your Address)
KYA, or Know Your Address, is the practice of assessing the risk profile of a specific blockchain address itself — its history, labels, and behavior — independent of who legally owns it. It is address-centric screening, distinct from customer-centric KYC.
What it means
The distinction matters because a single legal customer can control many addresses, and a single address's risk profile is knowable directly from public blockchain data even before any identity is attached to it. KYA lets a business evaluate a deposit or counterparty address on its own merits — its past transactions, its label history, its exposure to known risk — regardless of whose name is on the account.
KYA is the analytical foundation that FreezeRadar-style wallet scanning is built on: every finding in a scan is, at its core, a statement about what a specific address's on-chain history shows, assembled from label data, sanctions lists, and pattern detection applied to that address and its transaction graph.
Real-world example
Before accepting a large deposit, a treasury team might run a KYA check on the sending address itself — checking its blacklist status, sanctions exposure, and counterparty history — as a standalone assessment separate from any identity verification already done on the counterparty as a customer.
Related terms
In FreezeRadar
A FreezeRadar wallet scan is fundamentally a KYA assessment — every finding is derived from the address's own on-chain history, not from any claimed identity behind it.
By FreezeRadar Team
Research and product team behind FreezeRadar.
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