[2018-02-17] Bitstamp Enlists Onfido to Improve New Customer Onboarding

[lemonte]

The digital currency exchange Bitstamp has chosen Onfido’s identity verification engine to onboard new customers.  Onfido provides a full-stack identity verification platform, which will assist Bitstamp in processing its large amount of new customer signup requests.

In December, due to the massive surge in demand for cryptocurrencies, many exchanges were forced to close their doors to new customers.  This is reflective of a larger issue within the crypto ecosystem, that of scalability.  The existing infrastructure did not have the capacity to handle all of the new traffic, which resulted in many would-be customers being unable to open trading accounts on various platforms, and caused long delays in transaction speed on the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.    

According to a recent press release, Bitstamp has been receiving more than 100,000 new account requests daily since December.  At the moment, Bitstamp is the EU’s largest exchange by volume, and has over three million customers.  To their credit, Bitstamp never shut down new customer registrations, even though trading volume on the change increased by over 1,000 percent in 2017.  In addition, Bitstamp has responded to the surge in demand for new accounts by quadrupling its staff size.

https://coinjournal.net/bitstamp-enlists-onfido-improve-new-customer-onboarding/

[1Referee]

Not shutting down registrations doesn't mean anything when new people can't verify themselves, and thus not fully utilize their platform. Bitstamp outsourcing their identity verification tasks says enough. No matter how you look at things, Bitstamp was just as crippled as exchanges having halted new registrations temporarily. Aside from their annoyances, it's quite impressive to see several exchanges in this market manage to experience +100,000 registrations on a single day. It's however impossible to know up front how many of these registrations will lead to a fully verified account, so we have to take the +100,000 registrations with a few grains of salt, or perhaps more.

[gentlemand]

I wonder if this means full offloading of all verification, or just the initial opening.

The main reason I intend never to use Bitstamp again is them springing their mystery deluxe KYC on you out of nowhere when you trip an unknown switch.

If I'm fully verified then I expect that to mean what it says.

[laurenB7742]

I know two friends or should I say acquaintances that work as customer support for Bitstamp. They had 100 000 new registrations daily in December and early January but this number dropped since then. People who registered in December waited two or more weeks to get verified. Some potential customers turned away when they heard about long waiting time. I hope this Onfido partnership will put Bitstamp back to No1 in BTC-EUR trading. My experiences with Bitstamp are better than with Kraken.