KYC stands for Know Your Customer, and there are a number of things that can fall under a KYC policy. Know Your Customer or KYC policies may vary from industry to industry.
Going from physical cash to crypto anonymously — without filling out any forms, giving a form of identification, or any other KYC-type procedures — is not as easy as it once was.
LocalBitcoins.com was founded in 2011 by Jeremias Kangas in Helsinki, Finland. Initially, LocalBitcoins allowed users to exchange Bitcoins for cash without any KYC policies. However, LocalBitcoins was shut down in 2023 after being pressured to implement KYC policies for users and ceasing cash-based exchanges in 2019.
So how does someone exchange cash (in this case, in the United States of America — even more specifically in Chicago) for crypto in 2025?
Step 1
You start by buying a gift card with cash in person at a store — I bought a $50 Amazon gift card in cash at a nearby 7-11.
Step 2
Go to a peer-to-peer exchange site. There are a number of them with varying levels of KYC, but there are definitely ones with no KYC where no one 😉 is the wiser of who you really are — where a user can make an account and then exchange a gift card for crypto on the platform without ever having revealed who they are. I used one without any KYC policies and turned my VPN to somewhere other than Chicago, IL, USA, which allowed me to make an account on the website.
I then found someone on the site who was willing to exchange the $50 USD Amazon gift card I had just bought for 0.00030546 Bitcoins — worth $28.83 USD at the time of our trade, or roughly half the gift card amount. I then wanted to send these coins to another wallet I knew I fully controlled. My initial 0.00030546 Bitcoins were deposited in a "Wallet" on the site where I had just exchanged my gift card for Bitcoins.
Step 3
Set up a new Phantom wallet and select Bitcoin (or another chain you exchanged your gift card for). Either way, there is no need to give any information that identifies you.
Send the crypto — for me, this was the 0.00030546 Bitcoins I had just received for my gift card. I sent the full amount to my new Phantom Wallet and ended up with 0.00026 Bitcoins, or roughly $25 USD — half the initial value of the $50 USD gift card. Also, the transfer address — the one the Bitcoins were initially deposited into and then transferred from to the new Phantom wallet — was definitely not my wallet alone, as I had thought. The wallet from which my Bitcoins were transferred had over five Bitcoins in it at the time of my transfer.
Congratulations
But we did it! We turned real United States Dollars into crypto without going through any Know Your Customer steps like giving a phone number or photo ID — for around half the initial value.
Even without LocalBitcoins.com, you can still anonymously turn cash into crypto without having it be tied to you. It will just cost you roughly half the amount in fees and take over an hour.
What did I do with my new untraceable crypto tokens, you ask?
I swapped my Bitcoins for Solana on another exchange without any KYC policies, keeping my VPN on and located outside the USA. I exchanged my Bitcoins for Solana and finally ended up with just under $25 USD in Solana.
And now, what did I do with my untraceable Solana? Nothing nefarious. I used it to send messages to friends who were kind enough to help test my new website, RawrJar.com — a Solana-based crypto jar that lets you send Solana or any SPL-based token (think meme coins) to another registered user with a text message. Unlike traditional tip jar apps (wrappers around Stripe API endpoints) like Ko-fi and BuyMeACoffee — where there is an approval period once a user creates an account or the potential for chargebacks — RawrJar.com has none of that. Sign-up takes less than two minutes, your account is approved instantly, and chargebacks? Well, those are impossible with crypto.