Blockchain.com & Veriff: Making crypto as safe as possible

Back in 2018, Veriff was a three-year-old company, just finding its feet in the evolving identity verification industry. A major turning point for our business came that year, as we became the verification partner of Blockchain.com, arguably the biggest cryptocurrency platform on the market.

In the three years since, our partnership has flourished as both businesses have grown successfully, and we’ve enjoyed working closely together to make sure Veriff is always helping Blockchain.com keep their customers safe on their platform.

We finally decided that it was time to have a chat with Blockchain.com’s team, about what they’ve been up to in those three years, how the partnership has been for them, and what the future holds.

In basic terms, what does Blockchain.com do?

Blockchain.com is one of the world’s oldest and most popular cryptocurrency platforms, for both retail investors and institutions. 

On the retail side we offer a wallet — over 80 million wallets have been created, with over 37 million verified users, in over 200 countries, transacting over $1 trillion of crypto. And we’ve made up over ⅓ of all Bitcoin network transactions since we started collecting network data in 2012. 

We’re a big part of the crypto ecosystem, we serve millions of customers around the world and help them get access to the tools of the future of finance. We also have a few other products — for more advanced traders we have our Blockchain.com exchange, which provides trading capabilities with lower fees and more features including margin and stop limits, and we also offer an explorer tool which helps people understand what’s happening on the Blockchains, primarily for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Finally, our institutional business serves high net worth individuals, family offices, crypto-native hedge funds and entrepreneurs, for everything from bespoke deals (options & derivatives) all the way through to bespoke lending.

What are the main challenges Blockchain faces in relation to fraud and identity verification?

It’s two-fold: first, we need to meet regulations, meaning we need to make sure we verify our users to the best of our ability (which is why we use Veriff), and two, we need to protect our users. 

Verification is a way to identify scammers, people trying to abuse the system, and also account takeovers, which are really a challenge for every fintech company in the world.

How did you come to partner with Veriff?

Back in 2018, both Veriff and Blockchain.com were smaller companies, but we saw that there was a fit to partner. Veriff could scale their business as we scaled our users — and that’s exactly what’s happened. Over the past 4 years we’ve seen massive growth in our user base and in crypto, and Veriff has been a big part of ensuring that our growth was safe for our users and compliant. 

How has the partnership been so far, and has Blockchain.com seen any benefits to using Veriff for identity verification? 

Veriff is a key partner in our verification process. The working relationship is really good, we have constant contact and check-in meetings at least every two weeks. We often request new features, and Veriff is greatest at giving us what we need for identity verification. 

Of course it’s also not only about verifying identities any longer, there’s a lot of other factors coming in like proof of address, reverifications, and other things Veriff can offer.

As your industry is gaining attention and acclaim, what are the future plans for Blockchain.com? 

We’ve already established a large and growing user base. Now, to make our way into more mainstream applications and usages, we need to continue to build trust with our current customers, prospective customers, and more.

Crypto is a new concept for many users, so trust is critical for the growth of the industry more broadly. This also includes building trust with local and international regulatory bodies for AML and KYC requirements. We’re investing heavily across the board in ways to be more compliant, to protect our users from bad actors and keep bad actors from the platform. 

We want to shine a light on the potential, and show that even though there is something cryptic about crypto, if you go with a company like Blockchain we’ll do the heavy lifting to make sure you’re operating in an environment that’s as safe as possible. 

Giving people the tools they need to keep their digital assets secure is going to become more and more important as we enter this new age of digital ownership. We’re excited to be partners of Veriff, and excited to see where the internet goes over our next three years together.