Know Your Customer
The process a regulated firm uses to verify who its customers are before letting them trade or move money.
Standard steps are collecting and verifying identity documents, checking the name against sanctions and politically exposed person lists, understanding the expected nature of the account, and for corporate customers, identifying the humans who ultimately own or control the entity. Higher-risk customers receive enhanced due diligence, meaning source-of-wealth evidence and more frequent review. The obligation is continuous rather than one-time, so monitoring can trigger fresh questions or restrictions long after onboarding. Readers meet it as the verification wall on a centralized exchange, and as the reason a decentralized protocol with no operator generally has no such step.
In practice
An exchange may ask a long-standing customer for documentation of the source of funds when deposit patterns change materially, even though the account was verified years earlier.
The common misunderstanding
That completing verification once ends the firm's obligations, when due diligence is ongoing and accounts can be restricted later on the basis of monitoring alerts.