Your Passport Scan Is a Liability: Moca Network on Identity for Humans and AI Agents

Identity verification costs platforms a considerable amount of money each year, with onboarding procedures incurring fees of around €70 to €100 per user for capturing documents, conducting liveness checks, screening against sanctions, performing manual review, storing data, and handling failed uploads. A growing number of regulations, such as GDPR, India's DPDP Act, Indonesia's PDP law, and the UK Online Safety Act, are pushing companies to reconsider the data they hold, while eIDAS 2.0 mandates EU member states to provide citizens with digital identity wallets by December 2026.

With deepfake technology proliferating, the distinction between human and AI agents on a screen has become increasingly uncertain, turning a compliance concern into a board-level risk.

Moca Network is Animoca Brands' solution to these challenges, offering an identity layer that connects over 600 portfolio companies and 700 million addressable users. The AIR product suite, which stands for Account, Identity, and Reputation, provides apps with a universal embedded account where trusted parties can issue verifiable credentials that users can carry across different platforms.

SK Planet, the operator of OK Cashbag, South Korea's largest integrated rewards program, has integrated AIR Identity across approximately 29 million users and 95,000 merchants.

Ishan Pandey, CEO of Moca Network, has worked in finance, crypto, and performance marketing before joining Animoca and Moca Network. He discussed the evolution of the conversation around identity in the tech industry, noting that decentralized identity used to be an abstract concept but has become increasingly important as regulation imposes costs and AI and deepfakes present new risks.

Enterprises are now focusing on verifying users without collecting documents, reducing breach surface, and granting AI agents limited access, rather than simply asking, "What is decentralized identity?" They are also considering how identity becomes a platform dependency rather than another.

The EU's eIDAS 2.0 regulation requires all member states to offer digital identity wallets by December 2026, with less than a third currently considered ready. While exact dates are not ideal for planning, preparation should begin now. Companies need to understand what claims they can make with national wallets, banks, or telecommunication providers and ensure they are prepared to transition to a portable trust layer that works across apps, wallets, partners, and agents.