Your Passport Scan Is a Liability – How Moca Network Is Redefining Identity for Humans and AI

Every time you buy a drink, sign up for a streaming service, or simply prove you’re over 18, you’re asked to flash a piece of paper – a passport, driver’s licence, or some other ID. Behind the scenes, that document gets scanned, stored, insured against breach and, eventually, audited. The whole routine costs companies roughly €70‑€100 per user when you add liveness checks, sanctions screening, manual review and the inevitable drop‑offs from failed uploads.

Regulators are starting to push back. GDPR, India’s DPDP Act, Indonesia’s PDP law, the UK Online Safety Act, and the upcoming eIDAS 2.0 (which mandates a digital identity wallet for every EU citizen by December 2026) are all demanding that firms only keep the data they truly need. At the same time, deep‑fake videos have exploded from half a million to an estimated eight million in just two years, turning the simple question “who’s on the other side of the screen?” into a board‑level risk.

Enter Moca Network, Animoca Brands’ answer to this growing identity crisis. Built around the AIR suite – short for Account, Identity and Reputation – Moca gives apps a universal, embedded account that can carry verifiable credentials issued by trusted parties. Think of it as a passport that lives in your phone, ready to be shown to any service without handing over a photocopy of the original document.

We caught up with Cham, the product lead at Moca Network, to understand how the platform grew from a handful of finance‑savvy experiments to a network that now backs over 600 companies and 700 million addressable users. Cham’s journey started in traditional finance, where eight years and a CFA qualification taught him the language of risk and compliance. A side‑hustle in crypto trading eventually led to a fund in 2017, a stint in performance marketing, and finally a role at Animoca when the NFT boom pulled him back into Web3.

“My career is a string of trust‑building moments,” Cham says. “Finance showed me how institutions manage risk, marketing showed me how incentives move people, and Web3 showed me what happens when users can carry assets and identities across networks.” The AIR product suite is where those threads meet – it lets a user prove age, citizenship or creditworthiness without constantly re‑uploading a scanned passport.

When we asked how the conversation around identity has shifted, Cham explained that a few years ago decentralized identity was an academic concept. Most platforms either ignored it or reduced it to a KYC check for exchanges. Today, the pressure is practical: regulations make data storage expensive, and AI‑generated deepfakes make it impossible to rely on a simple selfie.

“Enterprises now ask, ‘How can we verify without repeating KYC, prove age without collecting a document, and authorize an AI agent without giving it unlimited access?’” Cham notes. The answer, according to him, is a portable trust layer that works across apps, wallets, partners and even autonomous agents.

Big tech is already moving toward passkeys and device‑bound credentials, but those solutions tend to stay inside closed ecosystems. Moca’s vision is broader – a network‑level identity that isn’t locked to a single platform, allowing companies to avoid building a new dependency every time a regulation like eIDAS 2.0 arrives.

So what does “readiness” actually look like? Cham warns against obsessing over the exact deadline. “Implementation will vary, enforcement may be gradual, but the direction is clear: users will soon expect to use their national wallets, banks or telcos to prove anything they need. If you keep asking for passport scans, you’ll be left behind.”

For companies that haven’t started, the immediate steps are simple: audit what personal data you currently hold, identify which pieces are truly necessary, and explore how verifiable credentials could replace those data stores. Begin pilot projects with a trusted provider, experiment with zero‑knowledge proofs, and make sure your architecture can accept wallet‑based attestations when they become mainstream.

In short, the era of repeated passport scans is winding down. The next wave will be about embedding a portable, privacy‑preserving identity that works for humans, bots and the AI agents that will increasingly act on our behalf.