KYC-chain

A blockchain based KYC registry prototype

Project description

Know your customer (KYC) checks are currently an extremely time consuming and costly affair. Banks have to spend millions of dollars every year to keep up with KYC regulations or risk being fined heavily. Through KYC chain we aim to simplify this process to a great extent.

KYC-chain eliminates the redundant KYC checks that banks currently perform by maintaining a common secure database in a block-chain. The nature of a block-chain ensures that unauthorized changes to the data are automatically invalidated. The proof-of-reputation concept makes the verification process more robust.

Currently we have built this registry over a local test-net that we hosted our personal laptops. So, there are a few limitations regarding scalability such as the maximum number of banks that can be registered which is currently capped at 10 and so on. Going ahead we plan to deploy this registry over the Ethereum network to increase its scalability.

Requirements

The system must have NodeJS and ethereumjs-testrpc installed. Be sure the npm version is >= 5.6.0 and node version is >= 9.4.0. Check the version numbers by using the terminal commands node -v and npm -v. Install testrpc using the command line npm install -g ethereumjs-testrpc in linux.
Links - https://github.com/ethereumjs/testrpc
https://www.npmjs.com/package/ethereumjs-testrpc/tutorial

Instructions to run

1. Open a terminal window and execute the command line testrpc.
2. Open another terminal and go to the root directory.
3. Execute the init.js file using the command line node init.js.
4. After about 10-15 seconds, we obtain a 20 byte address. This is the address of the compiled smart contract.
5. Go to the file root\js\contractDetails.js and open it using a text editor.
6. Edit the first line denoting the contract instance address given by the variable contractAddress to the 20 byte address obtained in step 4.
7. Now the application is ready for use. Make sure the terminal with testrpc is up and running. It acts as the local ethereum test network.
   Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9S8yPVr7G4
   Promo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDSAQV4vPnk