Turning Compliance Into User Empowerment: Charlene Wang on The Crypto Megan Podcast

At Bitcoin Vegas, Charlene Wang, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Zyphe, sat down with Crypto Megan for a candid discussion about the future of digital identity, compliance, and the path to mainstream Web3 adoption.

The episode offered Wang the opportunity to highlight the problem Zyphe is addressing: transforming compliance requirements into user empowerment through privacy-first, decentralized identity solutions.

As Wang shared, she was eager to make the leap into Web3 to help address the recurring problems of KYC (Know Your Customer) and KYB (Know Your Business): “Your identity is something you should fundamentally own. Today, every time you go through onboarding, your data spreads across multiple servers, often stored for five to ten years. That’s risky for users and a massive headache for companies.”

A core theme of the conversation was the broken state of compliance and data handling in both Web2 and Web3. Centralized storage, layers of middlemen, and human error create weak points, like the widely discussed breach at Coinbase, where customer support access was exploited.

Compliance exists for a reason, Charlene noted: regulators want to protect against financial crimes. But the old model forces companies to store huge repositories of personally identifiable information (PII), which creates a prime target for hackers and internal abuse.

Charlene outlined how Zyphe tackles the compliance challenge with a privacy-first, decentralized architecture, including decentralized vaults where each user has their own encrypted vault, ensuring they - not companies or even Zyphe - own and control access to their data. This protection is further enforced by a sharding process where sensitive data is broken into pieces across decentralized nodes, making mass breaches far more difficult.

The end result is compliance without exposure, where companies can demonstrate required verification and anti-money laundering steps, while avoiding the risk of retaining centralized databases of PII.

“Ultimately,” Charlene explained, “compliance shouldn’t be something people think about. It should just be embedded into your identity. That’s when self-sovereign identity becomes real.”

The discussion also acknowledged the tension between regulation and innovation. While the Web3 ethos favors maximum decentralization and potential use of zero-knowledge proofs, regulators still require source data for compliance.

Zyphe addresses this via a hybrid approach: the system decentralizes, secures, and limits access to user identity information, but retains enough source data to satisfy regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions. This avoids the biggest headaches for both users and companies around identity verification and personal data protection, while also providing immutable data and audit trails for regulators. 

Charlene sees trust and user experience as the industry’s biggest barriers to mass adoption. “Regulation follows where users demand change,” she said. “If we build systems that are trustworthy and seamless to use, adoption will accelerate.”