Coinbase Bets on Machine Learning to Speed up Identity Verification

“In most cases, verification will now take seconds–not hours,” Coinbase wrote in a blog post published yesterday. The app, which is the largest crypto exchange in the United States in terms of users, announced plans to implement machine learning technology to verify the identities of new users. The blog post also said that an “additional ID verification vendor” is on call for “increased loads during periods of peak demand.”

Coinbase added that the new technology has helped to increase the success rate of identity verification to ninety percent, citing the remaining ten percent’s cause of failure as low-quality photos submitted by customers.

In the past, Coinbase has been heavily criticized within the crypto community for being slow to respond to identity verification requests and other requests from users for help and support.

Customer Service Issues Have Plagued the Crypto Industry

Indeed, the massive influx of new users into the crypto space during Q4 of 2017 sent crypto exchanges across the board scrambling for ways to handle thousands of applications for new accounts and requests for customer service.

In early November of last year, co-founder of Altana Digital Currency fund Alistair Milne compiled data revealing that more than 100,000 users had signed up for Coinbase accounts in just one day.

Coinbase added 100,000 users in the past 24hrs
Data: https://t.co/R9B63J2d6Q#bitcoin

— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) November 2, 2017

Nightmarish stories of users who had lost access to their funds and hadn’t received any response from customer support for days or weeks were certainly not unique to Coinbase, but managed to cause users to lose faith and trust in the platform nonetheless.

AJ Asver, Product Manager at Coinbase and the author of the blog post detailing the improvements to identity verification, acknowledged Coinbase’s troubles with handling large amounts of customer service needs over the past several months, writing that the experience has been “frustrating for customers–and [Coinbase’s] team.”

Hopefully, this step forward represents a broader movement within the cryptocurrency space to improve customer support.