Founded in March 2018, Bybit is one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency exchanges with more than 6 million registered users. It endeavors to provide an innovative online trading, mining and staking experience for retail and institutional clients around the world. This includes offering flexible crypto trading strategies for both novice and experienced traders. In 2020, the exchange won “Most Reliable Trading Platform” at the International Investor Awards.
Bybit delivers a suite of products such as spot and derivatives trading, an NFT Marketplace, a ByFi Center, and much more. Its growing team consists of industry-leading technology developers and financial/consumer technology experts. Their mission is to help crypto believers achieve their dreams by creating a fair, transparent and efficient exchange environment.
The Challenge
Bybit chose FATF recommendations as the basis for their KYC policy. This meant finding an automated solution to fight fraud, stay compliant with regulations, and ensure that users are honest. That’s when the company decided to partner up with a KYC provider.
By implementing a KYC system, Bybit wanted to reduce human power resources so that their employees could focus their attention on the complicated cases identified by the system itself. Their general aim was to stop fraudsters from passing the onboarding stage and detect forged documents and duplications.
Why Sumsub?
Prior to making their choice, the team conducted A-B testing with other providers. The key criteria for their final decision were the following:
- High verification speed
- Effective forgery detection
- Automated checks
- User-friendliness of the platform
- Responsive 24/7 support
All things considered, Bybit ultimately decided on Sumsub due to the solution’s high level of automation and responsiveness and an easy, user-friendly platform for them as a client. Thanks to the ready-made SDK, they didn’t have to complicate the process with coding. The system does verification automatically, and the Bybit team doesn’t have to get involved except for complicated cases. Another crucial point was a fast response whenever an issue happens. That’s why among other competitors Sumsub stands out as a preferred partner for KYC.
The Solution
Sumsub provides Bybit with two levels of verification checks. The first level of verification — ID verification and a biometric liveness check — is enough for users who wish to withdraw up to 50 BTC. The second level applies to those who wish to operate with larger sums, and involves a proof of address (PoA) check to verify that users aren’t coming from crypto-restricted countries. To ensure current residence, the solution validates PoA with a maximum of 3 months from the issue date.
As a crypto exchange, what makes Bybit different is their care for customers and clients’ experience. It also reflects in the KYC approach. They provide fast feedback on each unsuccessful verification case so that end users know what’s wrong and how they can get onboarded quickly and successfully.
Sumsub also accepts users from all countries where Bybit works, and so far there hasn’t been one case where a user’s location wasn’t supported.
Implementation
Bybit became a Sumsub customer in July 2021, and the entire integration process took one month. The solution was quick enough in terms of system implementation, and its eventual ease of use was another competitive advantage.
The Results
Before finding a KYC partner, Bybit used to put up with delayed checks and verification errors. Sumsub has solved these key issues, so they no longer receive complaints about delayed processing.
Verification time is what Bybit really appreciates about Sumsub. А user verification process now takes about one minute.
The average pass rate is 78% for first-level verification — that is, liveness + ID check.
Sumsub eventually started detecting up to 99% of forgery attempts targeting Bybit. For instance, a user on Twitter claimed to have bypassed Sumsub’s facial biometric check (liveness), but this turned out to be a fake statement — as this particular user was rejected by Sumsub at the first onboarding stage.
Bybit values Sumsub’s proactive approach to difficult situations. There was a case involving a Turkish driver license (DL), a document that’s often rejected due to a systematic problem with the DL issue numbers. In other words, documents belonging to different people could end up having the same number. Therefore, Sumsub created a special feature which adjusted the verification process so that DL holders with matching numbers wouldn’t be rejected as duplicates.
Future plans
In the near future, Bybit is planning to automate their KYB checks with Sumsub’s KYB solution. This is particularly important since they foresee tremendous customer growth in 2022 and have a lot of new products to offer. Sumsub will be standing by to provide smooth verification, anti-fraud protection, and KYC/AML compliance at every step of the way.
Bybit is expected to see exponential growth in 2022. They have just launched their own P2P and NFT, so they’re expecting their user base to multiply in the very near future. They are also partnering with a DeFi exchange as well, which will further drive customer growth.
As Bybit’s client base and product line expand and develop, Sumsub will do its best to remain their long-term KYC/KYB partner, creating any updates necessary to sustain growth in the fast-moving world of crypto.
