Crypto platform Binance chooses Liquid for biometric KYC checks in Japan

Global cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance has chosen Japanese know your customer (KYC) and selfie biometrics vendor Liquid Inc amid rising concern about the effect of AI cyber-attacks on the company’s identity verification.

Binance Japan started onboarding users on its newly launched platform on Monday, two years after the largest global crypto exchange was warned by local regulators for operating without a license. In order to migrate to Binance Japan, users will have to go through a KYC process with the help of Liquid Inc.

“Liquid eKYC realizes an identity verification process with an extremely low user drop-off rate through its superior facial recognition and ID document image recognition technologies,” CEO of Liquid Hiroki Hasegawa says in an announcement.

Hasegawa added that Liquid has been working in other industries including banks, Web3-related services, telecommunications carriers, second-hand goods markets, the sharing economy, dating applications, and metaverse-related services. The Japanese eKYC vendor recently announced its intention to move farther into Southeast Asia.

Binance has reasons for introducing KYC checks other than keeping regulators at bay. Its deal with Liquid comes just a week after CEO and founder of Binance Changpeng Zhao took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to raise the alarm about the effects AI attacks could have on identity verification. The founder was commenting on an AI-generated video showing an avatar of HeyGen co-founder and CEO Joshua Xu.

“This is pretty scary from a video verification perspective. Don’t send people coins even if they send you a video,” Zhao wrote.

Binance had 128 million registered users as of 2022.

The exchange started rolling out KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) measures in 2021 to ensure its compliance. One of its partners is U.S.-based Jumio, which is currently battling a biometric data privacy lawsuit in the U.S. state of Illinois for providing biometric checks for the crypto exchange.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  document verification  |  identity verification  |  KYC  |  Liquid Inc  |  selfie biometrics