Sumsub Report: 74% of Crypto Providers Choose Verification Accuracy Over Speed

Sumsub, a leading full-cycle verification platform that enables scalable compliance, has released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how crypto companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026.

Some of the key global and regional highlights of the Sumsub report include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritising verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).
• Despite global fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.
• In APAC, fraud climbed from 2.0% in 2024 to 3.3% in 2025—a 65% year‑on‑year spike—as fraudsters increasingly probe fast‑growing, innovation‑heavy markets and exploit gaps created by rapid product rollouts and evolving regulatory expectations.
• 63% of surveyed APAC companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 13% unsure if it happened or not–emphasising the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

User Experience Evolution in Crypto

According to surveyed crypto providers, three of the main verification hurdles in 2025 were false positives/false negatives (affecting 60%), slow verification times and poor UX (58% each). While verification accuracy is the top priority for almost three quarters of crypto companies, balancing onboarding speed and user experience alongside this remains critical.

That said, Sumsub internal data analysis reveals that the overall industry’s pivot toward accuracy, better internal processes, and more advanced technology is paying off. Even as platforms faced stricter regulatory requirements and increasingly sophisticated fraud attempts, user pass rates continued to improve gradually, reaching 94% of all verification attempts on average, up one point from 2024, which translated into millions more successful legitimate users onboarded globally.

Similarly, in APAC, the steady one‑point year‑on‑year increase from 92% in 2023 to 93% in 2024 and 94% in 2025 shows that crypto services and products are successfully optimising verification flows and documentation requirements to help genuine users pass on the first attempt, particularly in mature, high-standard ID ecosystems like Singapore.

Average verification time declined from 22 seconds in 2024 to 19 seconds in 2025 (-14% YoY), reflecting fewer retries and better verification flow designs. In APAC, verification speeds held steady at 19 seconds, a notable consistency as markets such as Singapore tightened regulatory regimes.

This includes expanded requirements under the Payment Services Act such as full customer due diligence (CDD) and identity verification, mandatory source-of-funds checks, politically exposed person (PEP)/sanctions screening, Travel Rule compliance, and guidelines to ensure that at least 90% of customers’ assets are held in cold wallets. This stability comes even as platforms layer in more robust checks to meet new licensing, stablecoin, anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) requirements, as well as address emerging risks, including deepfakes and synthetic identities.

Another notable trend is UX merging with compliance, increasing popularity in Non-Doc and Reusable Identity solutions among future-oriented crypto platforms: the former refers to document-free user onboarding, and the latter allows to verify clients across multiple platforms without repetitive document uploads. In 2026, high pass rates are expected to be maintained alongside compliance requirements in increasingly complex cross-border onboarding scenarios.

“Crypto has entered a phase where operational discipline matters more than momentum,” said Andrew Sever, Sumsub’s Co-Founder and CEO. “In 2025, the conversation shifted from ‘How fast can we grow?’ to ‘How well can we scale under scrutiny?’ Regulatory execution, fraud resilience, and onboarding efficiency are no longer separate challenges—they’re interconnected systems problems. In 2026, sustainable growth will belong to those who build reliability into the core of their product and infrastructure from day one.”

Crypto Fraud Trends Identified by Sumsub

While global fraud rates remained largely stable from 2024 to 2025, the dynamics varied across regions: APAC rose 65% to 3.3%, while Europe saw a modest 8% increase to 1.4%, the lowest rate globally. LATAM fell 7% to 1.4%, matching Europe’s low, as Africa declined 28% to 2.6%, and North America dropped 38% to 1.6%.

Fraud exposure in 2025 was widespread across crypto platforms: 63% of APAC respondents experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 13% unsure if it happened or not. Instead of relying on a single technique, modern fraud operations increasingly combine social engineering, synthetic identities, and mule networks to bypass controls and exploit weaknesses in identity verification and transaction monitoring, turning fraud into a targeted and persistent threat rather than a series of isolated incidents. Globally, over half (57%) of surveyed crypto providers prioritise AI-powered fraud detection and 51% invest in advanced fraud analytics and monitoring.

Global Regulatory Updates

Adding to the complex fraud challenge, the 2025-2026 period marks a global regulatory inflection point for crypto, with regulators moving decisively from high-level policy frameworks to operational enforcement–encompassing Travel Rule obligations, CARF tax-reporting regimes, stablecoin oversight, VASP licensing, and more.

Crypto Travel Rule compliance is expected to become a baseline market requirement instead of a competitive differentiator, with the majority (51%) of surveyed platforms either fully ready (23%) or actively implementing (28%) FATF Recommendation 16, and 43% reporting uncertainty over their integration status. APAC shows stronger readiness, with 93% either fully compliant (44%), implementing (37%) or planning to (12%), and only 7.3% reporting uncertainty.

Crypto has entered a regulated maturity era: growth in 2026 is defined by regulatory scrutiny, sophisticated fraud pressure, and competition to deliver compliant, low-friction onboarding at scale. Beyond core licensing for Major Payment Institutions (MPI), Singapore has expanded its oversight of specialised sectors with the Financial Services and Markets (Digital Token Service Providers) Regulations 2025 which made it mandatory for all Singapore-incorporated entities to be licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) even if they exclusively served overseas clients and did not market services within Singapore. This ensures that brokers, dealers, and custodians are all operating under the same high-standard compliance requirements as global exchanges, highlighting how compliance stopped being theoretical and optional.

“Regulated maturity means building better systems, not just adding more rules. The platforms that win will be those that embed verification into their product DNA and wrap automation in strong controls, transparency, and accountability,” explains Ilya Brovin, Chief Growth Officer at Sumsub. “In the era of AI agents, the central dilemma is how AI-powered verification vendors continuously outmaneuver AI-driven fraud without eroding user experience or auditability. Those who solve this dynamic won’t just meet regulatory expectations — they’ll define the next standard of trust in crypto.”

To get the full Sumsub State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report, please check: http://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/.