Blockchain company Belfrics has launched the world’s first KYC-compliant blockchain, Belrium, in the Indian market. It will offer government and private companies a secure, private, personalised and decentralised ecosystem with an aim to decentralise and create transparent and immutant KYC compliance.

Singapore-based Belfrics claims that a KYC-compliant blockchain not only saves considerable time and cost of doing business, but is also a secure platform that weeds out the risk of data theft and cyber security-related issues.

Praveenkumar Vijayakumar, Founder and CEO, Belfrics Group, told Business Line that the launch in India is timely, as the country grapples with issues around KYC norms, data privacy and cyber security.

“Belrium will be able to help governments, businesses and enterprises in not only reducing the customer on-boarding time, but will also simplify the compliance process by eliminating the need for repetition,” he added.

Belrium is a mix of private and public blockchains. It is an open source infrastructure on which start-ups, banks, government and other related entities can build and run their applications.

The company, which entered India as a crypto platform, had to shift its business focus to blockchain, after the RBI barred financial institutions to engage with crypto entities in April this year.

Santhosh Palavesh, Chief Innovations Officer of Belfrics Group, said: “Blockchain technology has always been married with anonymity, where the end parties (sender’s and receiver’s) wallets cannot be identified, leading to money laundering and scams. We wanted to solve this by introducing a KYC-compliant blockchain.”

Explaining the difference between the KYC done by exchanges and those through KYC-compliant blockchain, Palavesh said that exchanges can store KYC documents in an excel sheet or in a CRM and is not a foolproof system. However, on Belrium, unless the end parties’ wallets are identified and verified, the transaction doesn’t happen by any other third party, the company claims.

“For scaling up the product, we are looking at the GDPR lot to be one of the huge waves which we are planning to ride on. How demonetisation shot up Paytm, similarly, GDPR implementation could shoot Belrium up,” he said, adding that 63 per cent of Indian entities are not GDPR-compliant and are Belrium’s potential clients.

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