Answer

What do you need to open a business crypto account?

Updated August 2026. Evergreen page — refreshed in place as facts change.

Every legitimate platform asks for roughly the same file, because the requirements come from federal customer-due-diligence rules, not house preference. Here's the list, why each item exists, and the mismatches that cause 90% of delays.

The document list, item by item

Each item answers one due-diligence question about your company:

• Formation documents — proves the entity exists as filed with its state
• EIN confirmation — ties the entity to its federal tax identity
• Beneficial-owner IDs — identifies the humans at 25%+ ownership (a federal rule, not platform policy)
• Business profile — what the company does and roughly how much it expects to move, which calibrates monitoring
• Business bank details — where dollar settlements go, titled to the same entity

Who counts as a beneficial owner

The standard is ownership of 25% or more, directly or indirectly, plus at least one person with significant management control (a CEO or managing member) regardless of ownership. Indirect matters: if a holding company owns 60% of your operating company and one person owns half of that holding company, that person is a 30% indirect owner and gets verified.

This is why layered structures take longer — each layer adds people to identify. A clear ownership chart submitted up front turns that from correspondence into arithmetic.

The mismatches that stall applications

Almost every delayed file has a consistency problem rather than a missing document: the entity name spelled differently across state filing and bank account, an owner's ID showing a different name than the operating agreement, an EIN letter for a predecessor entity. Reviewers must resolve every discrepancy, and each one costs a round-trip.

Before submitting, read your own file like an auditor: same entity name everywhere, current IDs, ownership percentages that sum sensibly. Ten minutes of self-review routinely saves days.

What you don't need

No business plan, no financial statements, no minimum balance, no licenses (unless your business is itself a regulated money business), and no crypto experience. KYB verifies who you are, not whether your treasury strategy is wise. Platforms asking for dramatically more than the list above are either serving a different risk tier or padding their process.