Cost per verification. The metric we lose on, and a published price that is softer than it looks

On cost per verification for a single, first-time check, Solidus is more expensive than the incumbents it is compared against.

What the metric is

Cost per verification is the price a business pays to establish, once, that a person is who they claim to be: one document check, one liveness check, one face match, one result. It is the number that appears on a vendor comparison sheet, and it is the number a procurement process anchors on.

Our published number, and why it is higher

Solidus publishes a fee schedule at solidus.network/tokenomics, go and read it. As of 2026-07-31 it lists KYC Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 as tiered protocol fees, with Level 2, the document-plus-face tier that maps to what most vendors sell, materially above the per-check pricing the named incumbents publish, which sits in a low single-digit dollar band.

Compared on a first-time check against Sumsub, Onfido/Entrust, Jumio, Persona or Veriff, we are the expensive option. That is the honest reading and we are not going to reframe it.

Three reasons the number is softer than it looks, including two that cut against us

First, it is denominated in a token that does not trade. The schedule is priced in SLDS and converted at an assumed $1/SLDS indicative price. A price derived from an assumed rate for a non-existent market is not a price.

Second, the schedule has never been tested against anybody willing to pay it. A price nobody has been billed is a proposal, whatever it is printed next to.

Third, and this is the one that should worry you, our own surfaces disagree with each other. On 2026-07-31, the tokenomics page's fee table and a feature description on the same page state Level 1 differently, by three orders of magnitude. The price for a returning, already-verified user appears as one figure there and a different figure on Verify's own home page.

We are not going to pick the flattering one and present it as settled. Those figures conflict, none of them is contracted, and any Solidus price you read today should be treated as provisional until we publish one that is internally consistent. This is a defect on our side, not a nuance.

Comparison tables are indicative, and that includes ours

KYC vendors quote per customer and rarely publish rate cards. Public pricing pages are a starting point, not the price a buyer at volume actually pays: the incumbent figures anyone compares us against were sourced from public pages at a point in time and are subject to change.

So treat every vendor comparison, ours included, as indicative. The only honest way to compare is to get quotes at your own volume.

Why we still think this metric is the wrong frame, and why saying so is not a dodge

Cost per verification measures the price of doing the work once. Our entire argument is about not doing it twice.

So we lose on this metric today, and the metric where we would win requires something that has not happened yet. Both halves belong on the page. See re-verification cost and total cost of ownership for the arithmetic across repeated checks, and read those as models, not as measurements.