Polychain Backs VeryAI $10M Raise for Palm-Scan ID on Solana

VeryAI has closed a $10 million seed round backed by Polychain Capital to deploy a smartphone-based palm-scan identity system on Solana — one designed from the ground up to stop AI bots, sybil attackers, and synthetic accounts from exploiting crypto platforms before they can cause damage.

What Is VeryAI's Palm-Scan System?

How does palm biometric verification work on Solana?

VeryAI is a palm biometric identity platform that uses a standard smartphone camera to capture a user's palm, converts the image into an encrypted, irreversible feature signature, and records the resulting identity attestation on the Solana blockchain. The system uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users verify their uniqueness across platforms — without handing over any personally identifiable data. No stored images. No reconstructible biometrics.

The reason palms are the chosen biometric is practical: they are far less publicly exposed than faces. Selfies are everywhere. Palm prints are not. That makes VeryAI harder to spoof from scraped social media data — a meaningful advantage over facial recognition in an era when AI can generate convincing face clones in seconds.

We're entering a period where the internet can no longer assume that every account, message, or video is created by a real person. AI is powerful, but it also breaks many of the trust assumptions that the internet was built on.

Why Does Crypto Need This Now?

Crypto is arguably ground zero for the bot problem. Sybil attacks during token launches, fake accounts farming airdrop incentives, impersonation scams draining wallets — the list is long and the losses are real. Centralized exchanges spend enormous resources on KYC flows that bots still punch through. A biometric proof-of-humanity layer that sits on Solana and can be queried by any platform in real time is, at minimum, a more elegant solution than what most protocols are running today.

Meltzer said the company is already working live with MEXC, Colosseum, Clique and Talus, with additional centralized exchanges and wallets lining up to integrate. That early traction matters — it means VeryAI is not just a whitepaper play. The round also attracted the Berggruen Institute and Anagram as investors, alongside Yakovenko's angel participation, lending both capital credibility and blockchain-native endorsement to the project.

How Does VeryAI Compare to World and Other Proof-of-Humanity Projects?

The comparison to World — Sam Altman's iris-scan proof-of-humanity project — is unavoidable. Both record biometric identity proofs on a blockchain. Both use zero-knowledge techniques to preserve privacy in theory. But World requires a dedicated Orb device to scan irises, which creates hardware distribution bottlenecks and has drawn sustained criticism from privacy advocates for the sensitivity of iris data and the centralized custody model behind it.

VeryAI's smartphone-only approach sidesteps the hardware problem entirely. Palms are captured on any modern phone camera. No Orb. No special device. No centralized company controlling the hardware supply chain. Whether that makes it meaningfully more private — or just differently risky — is a question worth asking. The encrypted feature representations are described as irreversible, but 'irreversible' and 'unhackable' are not synonyms, and the history of biometric database breaches should make every user at least cautiously skeptical.

Is the Broader Market Ready for Blockchain Identity?

Interest is certainly building. Chris Dixon at a16z has publicly warned about an incoming 'ocean of AI-powered deepfakes and bots' threatening internet trust, naming blockchain-based identity as a credible countermeasure. Vitalik Buterin has pushed for privacy-preserving models that prove specific attributes — like uniqueness or eligibility — without revealing full identity through technologies like zero-knowledge proofs. When the Solana co-founder himself writes a check into a project, it is a reasonable signal that the infrastructure layer is ready to support it.

The WLD token jump of roughly 40% in January — tied to reports that OpenAI was building a bot-free social network — showed how fast markets respond to proof-of-humanity narratives. VeryAI is betting that the next wave of that demand lands on crypto platforms specifically, and that palm scans beat iris scans on convenience, adoption speed, and regulatory optics. That is a bet worth watching.