Over the past decade, neobanks rebuilt the interface of banking. Slick mobile apps were layered on top of legacy rails. The user experience changed. The infrastructure did not.
The next decade will be about rebuilding the rails themselves on permissionless, crypto-native infrastructure.
Pantera Capital's recent piece, Building Permissionless Neobanks, captures this shift with clarity. It reduces banking to four simple relationships with money: store, spend, grow, and borrow. The argument is straightforward. Crypto now supports all four in principle. The remaining blockers are no longer purely technical. They are about identity, privacy, compliance, and credit.
That is exactly where zk identity layers like zkMe fit.
The Four Relationships And Why "Borrow" Is Stuck
Pantera's framework is refreshingly simple:
- Store: custody, deposits, savings
- Spend: payments, cards, merchant acceptance
- Grow: trading, yield, structured products
- Borrow: consumer and SME credit
On chain, store and grow are already well represented. Wallets, exchanges, DeFi protocols, and stablecoins cover much of this activity.
Spend is catching up. Cards, payment gateways, and local on and off ramp partners are closing the loop between crypto balances and real world commerce.
But borrow remains the real white space.
Under collateralized consumer credit is the economic engine of many leading neobanks. Yet DeFi still relies primarily on over collateralized loans. The constraint is not liquidity. Capital exists. The constraint is underwriting.
The missing ingredient is a scalable, privacy preserving identity and credit primitive that works globally.
The Identity Bottleneck for Permissionless Neobanks
Why does borrow lag behind?
Because any serious lending business must answer questions that are fundamentally about identity:
- Is this one unique human or entity
- Where are they located and what rules apply
- Are they on sanctions or watchlists
- What does their historical behavior and risk profile look like
Traditional finance solves this with heavy KYC and AML processes, centralized databases, credit bureaus, and jurisdiction specific integrations.
That architecture does not translate cleanly to a permissionless setting.
Data silos are hard to compose across chains and countries. Repeated onboarding destroys user experience. Storing raw personal data at every application creates liability and breach risk.
The financial logic of a crypto neobank can be built. What is still missing is the right identity layer to underwrite under collateralized credit in a way that is compliant, privacy preserving, and credibly neutral.
What a zk Identity Layer Contributes
A zk-powered identity layer like zkMe is designed to answer a simple question on permissionless rails: who can do what, without revealing more than necessary.
Concretely, that looks like:
- Turning traditional checks such as KYC, AML, sanctions screening, and document verification into zero knowledge proofs that can be verified on-chain.
- Allowing users to keep raw personal data off chain and under their own control, while still proving they meet required conditions such as age, residency, accreditation, or risk band.
- Enabling reusable credentials, where one compliant onboarding serves multiple wallets, chains, and protocols.
- Providing policy level controls, for example restricting access to users from specific regions or KYC tiers, enforced at the smart contract or API layer.
This transforms identity from a fragmented compliance burden into shared infrastructure. Any permissionless neobank can plug into it.
Unlocking Under-Collateralized Credit On-Chain
With a robust zk identity layer, the borrow block becomes tractable.
Builders can combine:
- Sybil-resistant identity proofs to ensure unique humans or entities
- Privacy preserving links between off chain credit data and on chain addresses
- Non-transferable credentials (SBT‑style) that represent reputation, limits, or risk categories without exposing sensitive details
- Dynamic updates when a user's risk profile changes, delivered as new proofs rather than raw data transfers
This enables products that look closer to real world revolving credit, BNPL, and SME lending. The difference is that they run on permissionless rails and are accessible to a global user base.
Under collateralized lending no longer requires sacrificing privacy or decentralization. It requires better identity primitives.
Privacy and Regulatory Alignment Without Web2 Trade-Offs
A major theme in Pantera's essay is the need for privacy and compliance parity with traditional finance, especially for enterprise use cases such as payroll, trade finance, and settlements.
Enterprises and regulators will not adopt systems that are either:
- Opaque black boxes with no policy visibility
- Fully transparent systems that expose every transaction and identity link to the public
Zero knowledge identity enables a middle ground:
- Regulators and partners can verify that required policies are enforced
- Users retain meaningful privacy and self custody
- Institutions reduce data storage and breach risk
For permissionless neobanks, this is not optional. It is a requirement for operating across jurisdictions at scale.
zkMe
How zkKYC Works: Understanding the Mechanisms Behind Privacy Preserving Verification
How zkMe Sees the Permissionless Neobank Stack
At zkMe, we think about the stack in four layers:
- Interface layer: wallets, cards, mobile apps, exchanges, agentic frontends
- Financial logic layer: trading, lending, payments, yield, on and off ramps
- Identity and compliance layer: zkKYC, AML screening, attribute proofs, reputation and risk credentials
- Settlement layer: public chains, L2s, stablecoins, tokenized deposits
Permissionless neobanks emerge where these layers converge.
By abstracting identity and compliance into a reusable zk layer, builders can focus on product and distribution rather than rebuilding KYC for the hundredth time.
Ready to build the permissionless neobank?
Start with a zk-powered identity layer today!
The Future of Crypto Banking: Identity as Core Infrastructure
Pantera is right. The infrastructure to build permissionless neobanks is finally coming together. Store, spend, and grow are already live in production. Borrow, under collateralized, global, and compliant, is the next unlock.
To get there, the ecosystem needs an identity system that is as global and composable as the underlying rails, yet as privacy preserving and controlled as users and regulators require.
That is the problem zkMe is focused on solving.
If you are building a wallet, exchange, lending protocol, or the next generation of neobanks and want to explore a zk identity stack, we would be happy to talk.
About zkMe
zkMe provides protocols and oracle infrastructure for the compliant, self-sovereign, and private verification of Identity and Asset Credentials.
It is the only decentralized solution capable of performing FATF-compliant CIP, KYC, KYB, and AML checks natively onchain, without compromising the decentralization and privacy ethos of Web3.
By combining zero-knowledge proofs with advanced encryption and cross-chain interoperability, zkMe enables verifiable identity and compliance data to remain entirely under the user's control. This ensures that sensitive information never leaves the user's device while maintaining regulatory-grade assurance for partners and protocols.
