Nec Signs Mou to Explore Biometric Verified on Chain Services on Avalanche

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NEC Signs MOU to Explore Biometric-Verified On-Chain Services on Avalanche Jul 10, 2026 / By Avalanche / 6 Minute Read Ava Labs and NEC signs a Memorandum of Understanding(MOU) to jointly publish a whitepaper proposes how NEC's biometric FaceVC and Avalanche's multi-chain architecture could verify identity and settle stablecoin payments in a single step, without ever putting biometric data on-chain. One of the world's leading biometric-identity companies is bringing its technology to Avalanche. NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701) has signed a MOU with Ava Labs to jointly explore a new generation of on-chain services that combine NEC's biometric digital-identity technology with Avalanche. As the first output of that collaboration, the two companies are publishing a technical whitepaper proposing an architecture for identity-verified stablecoin payments on Avalanche. The starting point is deceptively simple. Blockchains have become very good at moving value. They are far less good at answering a more basic question: who, or what, is actually behind a transaction? That gap is the source of fraud, repeated identity checks, heavy compliance costs, and payment experiences that ask people to hand over far more personal data than any single transaction needs. As AI agents begin acting on people's behalf, the question only gets sharper. This collaboration is a commitment to work on an answer, on Avalanche. For more than 125 years it has built mission-critical infrastructure, and today it is a global leader in facial recognition, with technology that has repeatedly ranked first in benchmarks run by U.S. government agencies. NEC's face recognition placed #1 in NIST's FRTE 1:N identification benchmark with a 0.06% error rate against a 12-million-person database, a distinction it has held repeatedly since 2009. That technology is not confined to the lab. NEC has deployed more than 1,000 biometric identification systems across 70 or more countries , spanning law enforcement, immigration, and national ID programs. Most recently it delivered population-scale face recognition for admission and payments at Expo 2025 Osaka. So when a company with that track record evaluates where to build the next generation of digital identity and payments, its choice of infrastructure is a signal. NEC's requirements are among the most demanding anywhere: privacy-preserving payments with selective auditability, enterprise-grade compliance, and infrastructure that can meet the needs of regulated institutions at global scale. Avalanche is where the whitepaper's architecture is built, because Avalanche is designed to meet exactly those requirements. “Building on the biometrics and digital-identity expertise NEC has developed over many years, we are accelerating our work toward a future in which DID and VC are woven into society. Combining that foundation with Avalanche's advanced multi-chain architecture gives us a real opportunity to design a next-generation identity infrastructure that preserves privacy while offering greater scalability, interoperability, and implementation flexibility. We believe FaceVC will grow increasingly important across identity verification, payments, AI agent authentication, and cross-border services, and our collaboration with Avalanche is a meaningful step in translating that potential into concrete use cases.” Yuya Higuchi, Director of Biometrics & Vision AI Division, NEC The whitepaper describes a two-layer architecture. NEC provides the identity layer, responsible for issuing and verifying a biometric Verifiable Credential called FaceVC. Avalanche provides the blockchain layer, which is distributed across three purpose-specific chains, each optimized for a job with fundamentally different requirements and connected natively through Interchain Messaging (ICM): A permissioned Avalanche L1 manages identity registries such as Decentralized Identity (DID) documents and credential revocation status. It stores credential validity, never biometric data. SETTL, a payment-dedicated chain on Avalanche, handles stablecoin settlement with privacy and compliance in mind. The C-Chain, Avalanche's EVM-compatible public chain, handles reward tokens and promotional NFTs. One design principle sits at the center of the whole system and is worth stating plainly: biometric data never goes on-chain. A user's face and purchase history stay inside their own wallet. The chain only ever receives proof that identity verification succeeded, along with the minimum information a given transaction requires. Convenience and privacy are meant to hold at the same time, not trade off against each other. The lead use case in the paper is in-store payment for inbound tourists in Japan, and the timing is deliberate. Japan's inbound tourism reached an all-time record of 42.68 million visitors in 2025, the first year above 40 million, according to JNTO, while the country's stablecoin framework has become operational, with fiat-backed stablecoins recognized as electronic payment instruments under the amended Payment Services Act. Together they make inbound payments a natural place to start. The mechanic is straightforward. A visitor obtains a FaceVC before arriving. At a participating merchant, a single approval completes identity verification and stablecoin settlement together, and any eligible rewards follow. It is a concrete illustration of a general idea, and the paper is explicit that it is a proposed architecture and vision rather than a launched product, service, or proof of concept. SETTL is a payment network built on an Avalanche Layer 1 (L1) and purpose-built for stablecoin payments. General-purpose public chains were not designed around the needs of a real-world payment operator. On a fully transparent chain, anyone can see merchant fees, payment flows, revenue-sharing arrangements, campaign rules, and individual spending histories. Payment operators also require capabilities that general-purpose chains rarely prioritize: auditing, compliance controls, and merchant-level policies. SETTL is designed to reconcile two things that normally pull in opposite directions: privacy for everyday transactions, and the selective disclosure required for compliance and auditing. Transactions are private by default, counterparties and the public cannot see amounts or trace payment relationships, While authorized auditors and regulators can be granted visibility into the specific transactions they are entitled to review. That combination is precisely what a regulated enterprise like NEC requires from a payment layer, and it is a central reason the whitepaper's architecture is built on Avalanche rather than on a single transparent, general-purpose chain. The architecture is a direct expression of why Avalanche was built as a multi-chain platform in the first place. Identity, payments, and rewards are not variations on one workload. Identity calls for privacy, compliance, and permissioned access. Payments call for throughput, predictable fees, confidentiality, and auditability. Rewards call for openness, interoperability, and public assets. Forcing all three onto a single chain means compromising at least one of them. Avalanche lets each workload run on infrastructure suited to it while staying connected through ICM. For a regulated enterprise, that is not a performance nicety. It is what makes the system buildable at all. This is the deeper story of the collaboration: Avalanche as infrastructure for trust, not only for financial transactions. The whitepaper frames inbound payments as a starting point rather than the destination. The same framework, identity assured by FaceVC, context provided by attribute credentials, and value transferred on Avalanche, is proposed as a reusable foundation for adjacent domains: private-key protection that incorporates biometric verification, fan experiences that tie limited rights to a verified person rather than a transferable token, and public-benefit programs where funds reach only eligible recipients and can only be spent as intended. Through this collaboration, the intent is to organize concrete use cases across stablecoin payments, inbound tourism, identity verification for financial institutions, AI agent authentication, digital wallets, and cross-border payments, and to advance toward proof-of-concept work and, ultimately, commercialization, all on Avalanche. The MOU is the beginning of that road. The whitepaper is the first milestone on it.

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