Crypto community lambasts dydx’s new facial verification requirement

Decentralized exchange dYdX (DYDX) has discontinued its new $25 deposit promo citing “overwhelming demand,” and denied claims that the DEX now required users’ verification.

The DEX had drawn the ire of the crypto community after it requested participants in the $25 deposit bonus to carry out a “liveness check” where it scanned users’ faces.

According to dYdX, the facial verification request was to prevent fraud and does not mean a “change in (its) ideological conviction about accessibility, transparency, mutability, or censorship” — as its optional.

Crypto community bashes dYdX

Many within the crypto community believe that the decision to stop the promotion was because of the heavy backlash the exchange received over it in the first place.

Several crypto industry stakeholders had reacted negatively to dYdX requests, with some suggesting that the exchange was acting on regulators’ instructions.

One user described the $25 bonus as” an insultingly small amount to pay for people to dox themselves.”

Corey Miller, a growth executive at dYdX, said, “there are no good decentralized identity solutions that exist today,” adding that if DEXs wanted “to become as big as the CEXs,” there would always be “trade-offs.”

Meanwhile, Adams Cochran noted that the DEX had “some legal grounds for them to justify some blocking – but biometrics collection is never acceptable.”

Other also shared similar views and described it as a bad idea. The crypto community paranoia is in light of recent sanctions against Tornado Cash by the US treasury.

The DEX’s native token, DYDX, was up 1.5% over the last 24 hours — trading at $1.53 as of press time.

Source: https://cryptoslate.com/dydx-discontinues-promotion-after-crypto-community-lambasts-new-facial-verification-requirement/