The conventional Know Your Customer (KYC) onboarding paradigm relies predominantly on centralizeddatasilos,creating vulnerable honeypots that expose sensitive consumer information to systemic breaches while incurringimmenseredundant operational costs for financial institutions. While Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) offers immutabilityanddecentralized trust, it introduces a "Blockchain-Privacy Paradox," wherein the transparent nature of public ledgersdirectlyconflicts with stringent data privacy mandates such as the GDPR. This paper proposes Zident, a novel, privacy-preservinge-KYCverification framework that decouples data storage from cryptographic validation. By integrating the InterPlanetary FileSystem(IPFS) for decentralized off-chain storage of AES-encrypted documents and utilizing zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge) for mathematical fact-attestation, Zident enables institutions to verify customer attributeswithout accessing raw identity data. Empirical results demonstrate a substantial reduction in on-chain storage bloat andsub-2-second validation latencies, establishing a legally compliant, highly scalable digital identity infrastructure. Keywords: e-KYC, Blockchain, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, IPFS, zk-SNARK, Smart Contracts, Data Privacy