Iron Fish: Why KYC?

As we near mainnet on April 20th, we’ve heard from community members who are curious about our need to perform KYC (Know Your Customer) for the testnet airdrop. In this post, we’ll explain why Iron Fish, as a USA-based project, is obliged to enforce KYC for airdrops.

Note: KYC is only for the airdrop. You will not need to pass KYC to use the Iron Fish mainnet or for any other purpose.

What is KYC? 

KYC verifies the identity and location of users. The US government requires companies to conduct KYC when transacting with users to avoid sending any value or asset to people or entities on the OFAC sanctions list or ones that are involved in terrorism, money laundering, or illegal activity.

KYC and the Iron Fish Testnet 

Thanks to the community, we were able to run what was, to our knowledge, one of the largest testnets in crypto (with 60,000 concurrent nodes at its peak!).

By airdropping $IRON to the Iron Fish community, the company is directly distributing tokens, and therefore we fall under US compliance laws that require us to do KYC before transferring that value.

Since we have had to enforce KYC, we’re also using the process to de-duplicate users to make this airdrop fairer, distributed, and reward more real humans rather than bots and fake accounts.

US Users 

Because of regulatory uncertainty around US securities laws, we are unable to send tokens to US citizens. We understand the concerns of US users and regret that this is the case.

As we’ve already indicated, we will hold the tokens of US users who complete KYC. If the regulatory requirements change and we receive legal clearance to send, we will revisit completing the airdrop. We are not at all guaranteeing this will happen.

Please remember that the KYC deadline is April 14th.

Questions? Check out our FAQ or post in Discord.

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