Sumsub released its State of the Crypto Industry 2025 report
Following this announcement, as the industry navigates a pivotal period of development and regulation, the State of the Crypto Industry 2025 report identifies three critical challenges that crypto providers had to face in 2024 and should address in 2025 in order to grow. These include security threats, technology capabilities, and regulation.
In addition, it was reported that the most popular fraud types globally are document forgery (which affected 31% of surveyed companies), phishing (20%), and money mulling (15%), followed by account takeover (14%) and forced verification (12%).
More information on the State of the Crypto Industry 2025 report launch
According to the official press release, Sumsub’s data revealed that fraud in the crypto industry has gone up by 48%, now making up 2.2% of all verification attempts across overall worldwide crypto platforms. This surge highlights the need for companies and businesses to adopt AI-powered detection, biometrics, and continuous monitoring in order to enhance security and protect their customers.
In addition, Nigeria recorded the highest rate of fraud across the crypto sector, with 8.3% of verification attempts flagged as fraudulent. In the Middle East, the three countries with the highest detected fraud rates are Iraq (5,7%), Yemen (3.4%) and Iran (3%), during a period when the region is struggling to implement effective cybersecurity frameworks due to outdated or inadequate laws on cybercrime.
Developments such as biometric checks, AI-backed automation, and document-free verification have boosted crypto platform customers’ onboarding success rates to 93.39% and reduced the overall verification time by 46%, improving customer onboarding while reducing drop-off cases as well. At the same time, the report highlights notable innovations like document-free verification, which has optimised verification times in every country where it was implemented, with an average improvement of 3.6%. Document-free identity verification has already gained an overall adoption by 19% of surveyed companies worldwide, with Africa leading the way at 27%, showcasing the region’s openness to innovative solutions. Whereas the Middle East is yet to discover the benefits of document-free verification, the top three countries across the globe with the fastest non-document user onboarding are Brazil, the UK, and Bangladesh.
Furthermore, the report also shows that the key user onboarding issues that crypto providers aim to mitigate include slow verification times, which impacted approximately 37% of surveyed companies in the Middle East, as well as false positives/negatives (50%). At the same time, three-quarters (75%) of respondents reported dissatisfaction with the overall user experience.
A key focus is also represented by the Travel Rule (FATF Recommendation 16), which urges VASPs to exchange sender-recipient information during crypto transfers. However, only 29% of companies and institutions fully comply, with unclear guidance cited as a key barrier. The gap between legal requirements rendering global crypto transactions transparent and their disproportional adoption leaves many firms and businesses with the risk of sanctions and fines. At the same time, in the Middle East, some countries have already enacted the Travel Rule (such as the UAE, Israel, Oman, and Bahrain), some are about to enforce the requirement (as Turkey on February 25, 2025), while others are still to implement a comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto transfers.
The report also highlights Sumsub’s analysis of the crypto-friendly hubs in 2024 with well-defined regulations, strong infrastructure, and innovation-driven environments.