Crypto’s 2026 Identity Stack: What We Have Found Out (Survey)

Respondents were most pragmatic and money-oriented in their choices for ID verification KPIs. Almost all of the top crypto market trends focus on how much fraud costs, either in money lost or time spent.

Beyond those options, respondents could choose from a long list of crypto trends that also includes things like team training effectiveness (13.89%) and сustomer satisfaction (9.72%), among others.

Putting fraud prevention ROI at the top means crypto leaders are under pressure to show that every extra dollar spent on IDV earns its keep. They want to know:

• How much loss was avoided.

• How much operational work was saved.

• How all that compares with vendor fees, headcount, and internal build costs.

The upside is that this mindset makes it easier to argue for bigger projects such as orchestration or stronger biometrics, as long as they are framed in terms of avoided loss and lower manual effort.

The downside is that some benefits are hard to quantify. Fewer regulatory headaches, better reputation with banking partners, and higher VIP retention do not fit neatly into a simple ROI formula, yet they matter a lot for a crypto platform’s future.

Response time to fraud alerts sitting in second place is very on-brand for crypto identity verification. Once a fraudster gains control of an account or passes KYC with a synthetic identity, the money can move off the platform in minutes.

That’s why crypto teams put a lot of emphasis on ownership for each alert type, on-call schedules that cover nights and weekends, and runbooks for common cases. Whenever such methods are lacking, response time suffers for reasons that have nothing to do with scoring models. This also connects directly to fragmentation issues, which we will return to later when we talk about orchestration.

The next two KPIs, chargeback rate and compliance with regulatory standards, sit at the same level in the ranking for crypto trends. They speak to two different audiences:

• Chargeback rate is mainly about payment partners and card schemes. For many exchanges and brokers, this is where fraud shows up on the finance team’s radar.

• Compliance metrics are about licensing, supervision, and audits. They inform regulators, banks, and institutional clients that trading is a controlled process that meets all formal requirements.

With that KPI context in mind, it is easier to see why companies use the tools they do for crypto identity verification. When respondents were asked which tools they rely on most for identity and fraud checks, three stood out very clearly. 

Interestingly, none of the three revolve around document or biometric verification.

On balance, it’s worth mentioning that automated document verification comes fourth (22.22%), and biometric verification is fifth (20.83%). That still places them above methods like human expert review (16.67%) and checks against databases and watch lists (12.5%).

The prevalence of MFA shows that, for many exchanges and brokers, users encounter these checks first:

• App or SMS codes for login and withdrawals.

• Hardware or app-based authenticators for higher limits.

• Extra MFA when location, device, or behavior looks unusual.

This is very much a web-security mindset. It fits the history of the sector, where account takeover, SIM swap incidents, and stolen logins were often more common than sophisticated KYC fraud. Even now, a lot of the financial damage still comes from compromised accounts rather than fake identities that slip through onboarding.

The upside: MFA is affordable and secure, users are familiar with it, and it blocks plenty of low-effort attacks.

The downside: Once criminals obtain both credentials and second-factor access (for example, through malware, SIM swap, or social engineering), MFA no longer helps. At that point, only stronger identity proofing, behavioral signals, and transaction-level risk checks can stop them.

Second place goes to geolocation and IP analysis. This is another indicator that crypto teams watch activity around the session very closely. Some important signals that feed into risk scores are:

• New countries for the same account.

• Access from known VPNs or anonymizers.

• Suspicious patterns across many accounts from the same IP ranges.

In practice, this does three things for crypto:

• It catches a lot of noisy bot activity and crude credential stuffing.

• It supports sanctions and rules based on geography, which are sensitive topics for the sector.

• It gives fraud teams a way to add frictions selectively, rather than slowing everyone down.

However, many attackers adapt: they use residential proxies, local devices, and hijacked accounts. If a platform stops at MFA plus simple IP checks, that will hold for a while, then may slowly erode as adversaries learn to mimic normal traffic.

The presence of dark web monitoring in the top three signals a quiet admission that:

• Credentials, documents, and even biometrics are leaked constantly.

• Many customers reuse passwords across platforms.

• Fraudsters actively buy and trade verified crypto accounts.

This defensive posture fits well with MFA and IP checks: one guards the login step, one watches the network around it, and one tracks exposure outside the platform’s walls.

Interestingly, if you ask crypto risk leaders what their ideal IDV setup should look like in the next few years, they mostly agree with the direction hinted at above. The tools that dominate right now (MFA, IP checks, dark web monitoring) are giving way to things that sit deeper in the identity layer and fixing the glue between systems.

Other options on the list (AML checks, fraud analytics, and others) still matter, but they sit below this top group when respondents describe their “ideal” configuration.

Biometrics is at number one, proving that crypto platforms don’t trust credentials alone. Passwords, OTPs, and devices are too easy to steal or copy, especially once data is circulating on the dark web.

By contrast, biometric verification promises three things that match crypto’s pain points:

• Proof that a person is physically present during key actions, not just replaying old media.

• A reusable anchor for identity across onboarding, recovery, and high-value withdrawals.

• Better resistance to synthetic identities and deepfake-style attacks that combine real and fake data.

This lines up well with what we see elsewhere in the data. High-loss organizations report more trouble with deepfakes and synthetic IDs; plus, across sectors, biometrics is the only tool that is consistently gaining ground in ideal setups. Crypto is simply leaning into that, but still wants to keep strong login security in the background rather than ripping it out.

Expert human review takes second place, and it’s just as revealing. Despite what the current KPI priorities suggest for the quality of team training, human oversight is still in demand.

Ideally, crypto leaders would like to have:

• Manual checks for very large transactions or VIP accounts.

• Extra scrutiny for complex cases: sanctions, law-enforcement requests, and unusual corporate structures.

• A human sign-off where regulators expect accountable decisions rather than fully automated ones.

The risk, of course, is that “human review” turns into a catch-all bucket for everything the system cannot handle cleanly. Without better orchestration and clear case design, specialists spend most of their time clearing simple alerts and rechecking basic details manually instead of conducting deeper investigations. That workload eats into fraud-prevention ROI and ruins the response time that crypto teams have been trying to improve in the first place.

The third pick, orchestration, connects directly to the fragmentation problems many teams experience:

• One provider for documents.

• Another for selfies and liveness.

• Separate tools for AML, fraud scoring, and case management.

An all-in-one IDV platform can coordinate all the above, fixing broken user flows and catching blind spots between systems.

In an ideal setup, orchestration would let crypto teams:

• Decide which checks run for each scenario without sloppy quick-fix coding for every change.

• Route high-risk paths to human review and low-risk ones through fully automated flows.

• See a single history of decisions across documents, biometrics, devices, and transactions.

That is exactly the kind of change that can improve both ROI and response time: fewer wasted checks, less duplication, and faster passage for legitimate users, while complex cases reach the right specialists sooner. The ideal tools crypto leaders want are aimed directly at the KPI pressures they face.

What does the future look like? Crypto is moving towards single, all-in-one identity orchestration solutions that fix the fragmentation issue and avoid the main obstacle on the path to smooth automation.

Crypto market trends for IDV may look a bit lopsided. On the one hand, you have very mature controls around accounts and sessions: MFA, IP checks, and dark web monitoring. On the other hand, you have an identity layer that still lags behind the threat profile, even though fraud teams clearly want stronger biometrics, better case work, and proper orchestration in place by 2026.

The good news is that leaders see the gap. Their ideal identity verification for crypto points in a healthier direction, where biometric checks and orchestration support the same ROI and response-time targets that management is already watching.

And there are more conclusions to draw from the data:

• What are the respondents’ IDV budget expectations for next year?

• How is the job of risk teams expected to evolve?

• What specific functions is IDV going to fulfill in the future?

For more unique industry insights, and to see how crypto trends compare to banking, aviation and other sectors, download our full report.