Unit Economics & Cost

Every number in this section is modeled. None of it is contracted revenue. Read that as the standing caveat on all ten entries, five of which say not-built and two of which say spec.

There is a second disclosure owed here, and it is uncomfortable: Solidus's own live surfaces do not currently agree on price. verify.solidus.network publishes $0.05 per presentation and $5.00 for an L2 KYC check; the marketing site's FAQ still says $0.001 per re-presentation. Those are 50× apart on the same metric. The pricing model is a proposal, not a rate card, and its source document says so in its first line. The discrepancy is filed as a defect, and until it is resolved, no page should quote a per-verification price as settled.

The argument this section makes

The incumbent identity-verification model charges per check, and every relying party runs its own check. So a user verified at four companies was verified four times and paid for four times. The portability claim is that the second through Nth check can be replaced by presenting a credential issued once.

Whether that is cheaper depends entirely on n, and the honest arithmetic is less flattering than the pitch:

A first Solidus KYC check is more expensive than an incumbent's, modeled at $5.00 against roughly $1.50–$2.50 for a Sumsub-class vendor. Reuse is modeled at $0.05. So Solidus costs 5.00 + 0.05n where the incumbent costs 1.50(n+1), and the two cross at n ≈ 2.4.

Below about two re-verifications, the incumbent is cheaper. That is the real shape of the wedge, and publishing the flattering half of it would be the kind of claim this Lexicon exists to prevent. The relevant terms are cost per verification, re-verification cost, verification reuse, credential reuse rate (the metric that decides whether n is ever reached) and total cost of ownership (which includes the integration work the per-check price hides).

The parts that are not about price

• Liability shift, who is answerable when a verification was wrong. This, not cost, is usually what a bank's risk committee actually cares about, and a portable credential raises the question of whether the issuer or the relying party carries it. Solidus does not resolve this; no legal framework has.
• Reliance between issuer and verifier: the trust relationship that makes accepting someone else's verification rational. Without it, portability is a file format, not a market.
• Vendor lock-in: the switching cost that makes identity contracts sticky, and the thing a user-held credential is meant to dissolve.
• Data residency and the right-to-erasure vs. audit-trail conflict: the costs that are regulatory rather than commercial. GDPR gives a subject the right to have data deleted; AML rules require records be kept. Those obligations genuinely conflict, and anyone selling you a clean answer is selling you something.

Where this category ends

Named-vendor price comparisons belong on verify.solidus.network, where a comparison page can source each competitor's published rate card and concede what they do better. The regulatory duties behind the erasure conflict are the EU and Türkiye sections. What a verification technically involves is the identity section.