KYB (Know Your Business)
KYB, or Know Your Business, is the corporate equivalent of KYC — verifying the identity, ownership structure, and legitimacy of a business customer, including its beneficial owners, rather than just an individual. It applies when a crypto platform onboards a company rather than a person.
KYB (Know Your Business)
KYB, or Know Your Business, is the corporate equivalent of KYC — verifying the identity, ownership structure, and legitimacy of a business customer, including its beneficial owners, rather than just an individual. It applies when a crypto platform onboards a company rather than a person.
What it means
KYB is structurally more complex than individual KYC because a business can have multiple layers of ownership, shell entities, and beneficial owners who are not immediately visible from incorporation documents alone. A thorough KYB process traces ownership up to the natural persons who ultimately control or benefit from the entity, since sanctions and AML risk attaches to those individuals, not just the company's legal name.
For crypto businesses onboarding institutional clients — funds, OTC desks, or corporate treasuries — KYB is where a meaningful share of practical compliance risk sits, since a business entity can obscure a sanctioned individual's involvement far more easily than a personal account can.
Real-world example
A crypto platform onboarding a corporate OTC desk as a client would run KYB to verify the company's registration, trace its beneficial ownership structure, and screen each identified owner against sanctions lists before approving the relationship.
Related terms
In FreezeRadar
FreezeRadar's wallet screening supports KYB workflows by assessing the on-chain risk of the specific addresses a business counterparty actually uses, independent of its corporate paperwork.
By FreezeRadar Team
Research and product team behind FreezeRadar.
Related reading
Continue exploring FreezeRadar knowledge content.