Everyone Is Racing to Put Biometrics On-Chain. We Made a Different Bet.
On July 10, 2026, Ava Labs announced an MOU with NEC, the company that has ranked #1 in NIST's global face-recognition benchmark since 2009, to jointly explore "FaceVC": biometric identity verification built directly into an Avalanche chain. It's the biggest institutional signal an identity project on Avalanche has gotten this year, and it's not us. Worth being honest about what that means, and what it doesn't.
What NEC and Ava Labs are actually proposing
The whitepaper behind the MOU describes three purpose-built chains working together over Interchain Messaging: a permissioned Avalanche L1 that stores identity registries and credential-revocation status, a dedicated payment chain called SETTL for stablecoin settlement, and the public C-Chain for rewards and promotional tokens. The first use case is concrete: a traveler gets a FaceVC before landing in Japan, then approves a stablecoin payment with their face at the point of sale.
To their credit, the design keeps a principle we also hold: biometric data never touches the chain. NEC's own language for it is direct: "biometric data never goes on-chain. A user's face and purchase history stay inside their own wallet." Only proof that verification happened, plus the minimum transaction data, gets recorded.
The honest part: we're not biometrics-free either
It would be easy to draw a clean line here, NEC does biometrics, KUMPLY does documents, and it wouldn't be true. Sumsub, the KYC vendor behind our own Tier 1-3 attestations, already runs real facial biometrics as part of a normal verification: 3D face mapping and liveness detection to catch a photo of a photo, and face matching between a selfie and an ID document at around 99% confidence. If we said we don't use biometrics, that would be false, and we'd rather lose an argument than tell you something untrue about our own stack.
So where's the real difference
Not in whether biometrics are involved. It's in what kind of company is behind them, and how narrow the thing being built actually is. NEC is a biometrics company first, holding the top spot in NIST's 1:N identification benchmark with a 0.07% error rate against a 12-million-person database, and it built its own recognition technology directly into a three-chain payment architecture, for one specific flow: face-verified stablecoin payments for travelers. It's vertical, specialized, and purpose-built for that use case.
KUMPLY is the opposite bet. We're a general-purpose compliance layer: Tier 1-3 for individual KYC, Tier 4 for business KYB, Tier 5 for the accountable owner behind an AI agent. We don't build our own verification technology, and that's deliberate. Sumsub is a vendor we chose, not a company we are, and we could swap it for another provider without touching AttestationStore or ComplianceGate. Any dApp on Avalanche can call verify(address) against our system for any of those three tiers. NEC built one door for one room. We built the hallway.
Three doors off that hallway, live today
Not a hypothetical. kumply.xyz/demo runs the same AttestationStore/ComplianceGate pair against three different real scenarios, no login required: a lending protocol gating deposits behind Tier 2 (Standard KYC), a tokenized real-estate fund requiring Tier 4 (Business/KYB) so only corporate entities can invest, and an AI agent marketplace requiring Tier 5 (KYA) before an agent can list itself for trading. Same two contracts, three unrelated use cases, one verify(address) call each.
Zoom out further and the market case matches the product one: Franklin Templeton already runs its BENJI money market fund on Avalanche, and KKR tokenized a slice of its Health Care Strategic Growth Fund II here too. Institutional money is already showing up expecting exactly the kind of gate a general compliance layer provides, not a single vertical flow.
The part we'll say plainly
Ava Labs partnering directly with the world's top-ranked face-recognition company is a bigger institutional signal than anything we've gotten so far, and it deserves to be treated that way, not minimized. What we can say with no hedging is the stage each of us is at: NEC and Ava Labs are still at "jointly explore," a memorandum signed in July 2026 with a whitepaper and no shipped product yet. KUMPLY's contracts are live today, tested, deployed on mainnet and Fuji. We're ahead on execution. They're ahead on institutional weight. Both things are true at once.
If your protocol needed to let in an AI agent, or a KYB'd business, or a verified individual tomorrow, whose infrastructure would you actually be able to call?