Nov 1, 2021 in-app Announcement
The Pi Core Team has developed a pilot KYC solution that will initially enrol 100 Pioneers per country. These Pioneers have an opportunity to KYC early and help improve our app’s algorithms so that our solution can be applied to as many Pioneers as possible before Mainnet. In the short term, we will gradually roll out more KYC slots for the pilot version than this initial 100 Pioneers per country.
Note that the Core Team is also working on translating this app in the future, so we recommend waiting for its full release if you cannot read English in the app.
Why is KYC important?
“Know Your Customer/Client” (KYC) is the process that verifies identification to distinguish genuine accounts from fake ones.
The vision of Pi Network is to build an inclusive and the most widely-distributed digital currency and economy for all Pioneers. The mining mechanism of Pi Network is social-network based, and the mining rate halves as the social network size grow by 10X. Therefore, Pi has a strict policy of one account per person.
This requires a high degree of accuracy to establish that members in the network are genuine human beings, preventing individuals from being able to hoard Pi by creating fake accounts unfairly. KYC thus helps ensure the genuine humanness of the network.
The KYC data we collect is used solely to verify the Pioneer’s identity and comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and anti-terrorism regulations. We’ve never sold any KYC data and will not do so without your consent. Please refer to our Privacy Policy for more details on “KYC data.”
How does the KYC solution work?
Pi Network’s KYC solution is built through our Pi App Engine as an ecosystem app. Keep in mind that this solution attempts to create a balance between accuracy and privacy while achieving scalability for millions of KYC, comprehensive coverage of diverse populations, and accessibility.
Our KYC solution combines machine automation and human verification to accomplish accurate and efficient KYC for everyone. Machine automation will be responsible for image processing, text extraction, fake ID detection, liveness check, and image comparison. KYC’ed human verifiers may then have to check for errors. The importance of having and improving the machine automation component is twofold: 1) scalability to KYC millions of Pioneers and 2) reducing the data exposure to human verifiers to better protect Pioneers’ privacy. Your participation in the current pilot release of the KYC app will help improve our machine automation to satisfy these goals.
Specifically, to protect individual Pioneers' privacy, personal data — except for data the machine failed to read — will be properly redacted. Human verifiers will be previously KYC’ed Pioneers who opt-in to work as a Crowdworker in the KYC app to verify redacted ID documents and selfie images to answer whether (1) the photo ID format is the same type as you stated in the data form and (2) if the person pictured in your ID is you.
Two rounds of human verification will be required after the machine automation component. In the first round of review, two human verifiers will only be able to see the redacted ID document to verify if this document is the claimed ID type. They cannot see a Pioneer’s data or face within this ID document. When the KYC app is fully released, the Pioneer performing the KYC will get to preview and pre-approve the redacted version of their ID document before the ID is reviewed by human verifiers. However, suppose the machine reading fails to process some personal data. In that case, the human verifiers in Round (1) will also have to verify the specific portions of the personal data in these sections.
In the second round of review, two other human verifiers will only be able to see the face in the Pioneer’s ID document and the face in the selfie. This will verify that these two images are of the same person. Other information in the ID document will not be viewable.
If a discrepancy occurs between the 2 human verifiers’ results in either round one or two, then a third human verifier will be the deciding vote in resolving the dispute. This system requires at least 4 human identifiers for each KYC application, all working independently. Again, no single human verifier will see the ID layout and the face of the same person, further protecting your privacy.
Human verifiers will be randomly selected from a pool of crowd workers from the same country as the ID document provided. Before verifying real Pioneers, they must first agree with the Service Terms of the app and then go through a tutorial to train their verification skills. Since these verifiers’ work is constantly cross-validated to prevent bad actors, providing consistently inaccurate verification will lead to their removal from the workforce pool.
The KYC app’s code may also be published as PiOS in the future so that community developers can help add country-specific features and documents to contribute to this project.
Disclaimer: The data submitted by these initial Pioneers participating in this Pilot version of the KYC app will be visible without redactions to the Core Team members who are developing this app — we need to check if the machine automation results are accurate when compared with your data. So, it is okay to wait until later if you are concerned about privacy.
When will Pioneers get to KYC?
We aim to build a fully workable and scalable KYC process through these measures. Once we feel that our KYC process is ready for mass adoption, the official start of mass KYC will begin before Mainnet's launch. After presenting a KYC solution for a specific country, we will offer a certain amount of time for people to ask questions and perform the KYC successfully.
Depending on participation levels and other Mainnet parameters, we will decide if Pioneers can KYC after Mainnet or not. Don’t miss out! Check into the Pi app daily to continue earning Pi and keep up with our weekly content.
