Glyph Partners With 3 Crypto Firms for Accredited-Investor Checks

Decentralized identity startup Glyph is partnering with a trio of digital securities companies to make their approaches to ID verification more convenient – particularly for accredited investors.

“Our technology handles any identity use case but we are very focused on accredited investors,” founder James Greaves told CoinDesk. In short, Greaves hopes accredited-investor checks become as easy as ordering a book on Amazon (the e-commerce giant's first use case).

Revealed to CoinDesk, Glyph’s technology is being integrated by Polymath, Swarm and Dealbox – three sites for managing digital securities. It’s the first announcement to date from Glyph, which was launched in 2017 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Greaves says Glyph will soon announce up to six additional partners.

Identity has become a crowded space in crypto, with companies like Civic, Sovrin, uPort and others offering ways for users to control how their information is shared online.

“Identity is one of the most important missing pieces of Web 3 infrastructure,” 1confirmation investor Richard Chen wrote in a recent overview of the space.

Yet with some ID efforts facing adoption challenges, Greaves says Glyph’s approach is intentionally targeted.

“Let’s just start with accredited-investor checks,” Greaves said. “Most identity companies try to come in and own the whole piece.”

For Polymath, Glyph becomes one of two services for verifying accredited investors, the high-net-worth individuals who by law have greater leeway in investing in securitized assets. By most estimates, roughly 10 million households in the U.S. meet the income criteria required of accredited investors.

Polymath’s Graeme Moore says integrating third-party services makes it easier for people to interact with the platform, which is used to launch tokens that comply with current securities laws.

“When you have to get your accreditation status checked every 90 days that can be a real pain,” Moore said. “Glyph does a better job than most solutions we’ve seen in terms of allowing investors to control their own identity.”

Social Security card image via Shutterstock