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GLOSSARY

Digital services glossary: no KYC, crypto fees and offshore hosting

Definitions for comparing digital services: identity policies, exchange rates, costs and refunds, followed by offshore hosting, copyright notices and network terms.

Version of September 13, 2026

At a glance

No KYC describes an identity-check policy; it does not describe the rate, fees or payout network. The definitions below keep those separate so offers can be compared on the same basis.

Crypto exchanges, costs and refunds

Apply these definitions in our exchange comparison method

No-KYC exchange and no-account exchange
A no-KYC claim describes the service’s identity-verification policy within its stated scope. A no-account flow describes registration. Record each separately, alongside the dated policy and observed execution; neither label alone establishes blockchain anonymity or custody architecture.
Fixed rate and floating rate
A fixed quote locks a rate subject to its validity conditions. A floating estimate can change before the service fixes the execution rate. Record the lock event, expiry and final amount instead of treating an estimate as a payout.

Primary sources: FixedFloat — FAQ — rates, fees and expired orders

Spread, service fee and network fee
The spread is a difference between the offered rate and a stated reference rate. A service fee is a provider charge; a network fee pays for a blockchain transaction. If already deducted from net output, do not add the same cost again.

Primary sources: Kraken — Overview of fees on Kraken · Ethereum.org — Gas and fees

USDT and its network
USDT is issued on multiple blockchains, including Ethereum and Tron. The token name alone is not a transfer instruction: both ends must support the selected network. Ethereum transaction fees are paid in ETH; these are separate from the USDT amount.

Primary sources: Ethereum.org — Gas and fees · Tether — Supported Protocols and Integration Guidelines

Fee reimbursement and deposit refund
Fee reimbursement pays back eligible costs after an exchange. A deposit refund returns funds from an uncompleted exchange, potentially with deductions under the service’s terms. A percentage-based promotional allowance is not necessarily reimbursement of the actual fees paid.

Primary sources: FixedFloat — FAQ — rates, fees and expired orders

Initial cost and cost after reimbursement
Using one reference currency and valuation time, compare value sent plus external costs with net value received. Subtract a reimbursement from the measured cost only after receipt; record any additional cost of using it. Keep conditional benefits separate.
Not measured
No comparable observation is available for the stated metric. It does not mean zero cost, no failures or a failed service. A published policy, displayed quote, operator declaration and completed transaction are different kinds of evidence.

General notions

Notice and takedown
The sequence by which a rights holder reports content to an intermediary, which removes it or blocks access to it. It is not a single legal category: depending on the legal order, that sequence conditions a limitation of liability, as in the United States, or forms part of an obligation to operate a notice mechanism coupled with a conditional exemption regime, as in the European Union.
Limitation of liability
A rule that, if conditions are met, puts the provider beyond reach for certain claims. It creates no obligation to act, and failing it does not amount to a finding of liability: that requires the ordinary law to be applied.
Contravention and administrative fine
Non-criminal sanctions, imposed by an authority or established under a national contravention regime, often carrying a cap calculated as a percentage of worldwide annual turnover and daily penalty payments. They are distinct from criminal penalties and from civil awards of damages.

United States law

Digital Millennium Copyright Act
A United States federal law of 28 October 1998. Its title II inserted section 512 into title 17 of the United States Code, which sets up limitations of liability for four distinct technical functions. Used as the name of a form or of a universal procedure, the term has no legal counterpart outside the United States.

European Union law

Conditional exemption of the host
Under the Union regime, the absence of liability for information stored at the request of a recipient of the service, conditional either on having no actual knowledge of the illegality, or on acting expeditiously to remove or block access once knowledge is obtained.
Actual knowledge
The state of fact that flips the condition for exemption. Under the Union regime, a notice is deemed to give rise to it where it allows a diligent provider to identify the illegality without a detailed legal examination. Merely receiving a message is not enough, and general awareness that the service is also used to store illegal content is not enough either.
No general monitoring obligation
A rule prohibiting the imposition on an intermediary of any duty to monitor the information it transmits or stores, or to actively seek facts indicating illegal activity. It concerns active searching, not the handling of a notice received.
Order to act against illegal content
An order issued by a national judicial or administrative authority, subject to minimum formal conditions — legal basis, reasons, identification of the authority, exact addresses locating the content, avenues of redress — and territorially limited to what is strictly necessary. Distinct from a private notice, which is not an order.
Digital Services Coordinator
The national authority responsible, under the Union regime, for supervision and enforcement in respect of providers established in its Member State: Traficom in Finland, ANCOM in Romania. That authority does not rule on the legality of any particular content.
Main establishment
The criterion linking a provider to a Member State, understood as the head office or registered office where the principal financial functions and operational control are exercised. The presence and use of the technical means necessary to provide the service do not, in themselves, constitute an establishment.
Online platform
A hosting service which, in addition, disseminates the stored information to the public. It is that qualification, not that of host, which triggers the obligations on internal complaint handling, out-of-court dispute settlement, trusted flaggers and suspension of abusive notices — with micro and small enterprises excluded.
Online content-sharing service
A narrow category of Union copyright law, defined by the storage and public provision of a large amount of works uploaded by users, organised and promoted for profit-making purposes. It carries a more demanding regime than ordinary hosting and expressly excludes several kinds of cloud service.

Iceland and the European Economic Area

Decision of the European Economic Area Joint Committee
A Union act becomes European Economic Area law only once it has been entered into an annex to the Agreement by a decision of the Joint Committee, and then incorporated into the domestic legal order — the latter possibly depending on a national constitutional reservation being lifted. This is the mechanism by which a country such as Iceland applies, or does not yet apply, a Union text.
Lögbann
An Icelandic interim judicial prohibition, enforced by the sýslumaður, the district commissioner. In copyright matters it can prohibit a provider from hosting data supplied by a recipient of the service, irrespective of whether it bears any responsibility for that data. It must subsequently be confirmed by court proceedings.

Network and verification

Regional Internet Registry
The body administering IP addresses and autonomous system numbers for a region, whose registration database is publicly queryable. The IANA registry indicates which regional registry administers a given block.
WHOIS and RDAP
Two protocols for querying registration data. The first has no mechanism for access control, integrity or confidentiality, and returns free text. The second standardises discovery of the authoritative server, the format of queries and the structure of responses; it is now mandatory for generic domains.
Status of an address object
A documentary registry attribute distinguishing allocation to a member, sub-allocation to another organisation, internal partitioning, and assignment to an end user. None of these statuses bears on the ownership of physical equipment, and a vendor’s trading name does not appear in them.
Autonomous system and routing data
An autonomous system is the entity that announces address prefixes on the network. The identity of the announcer and of its transit providers can be observed in publicly collected routing data, independently of the vendor’s claims.
Route Origin Authorisation
A signed object by which the holder of an address block, as recorded in the key infrastructure, authorises a given autonomous system to originate announcements for it. Its signature is cryptographically verifiable; the announcement it is compared against is not signed, and the object does not establish legal title to the addresses.
IP address geolocation
Geolocating an IP address is an inference or a declaration, never a measurement. The only standardised mechanism is a file published by the operator itself, deliberately limited to coarse granularity. The country attribute of address registries has never been given a definition and does not allow addresses to be mapped by country.

Primary sources

Reviewed September 12, 2026. The linked provider documents explain particular mechanisms; they are not recommendations or evidence that these providers qualify for a no-KYC selection.