Last month, GPT-4 Vision solved a reCAPTCHA in 0.3 seconds. The same puzzle took a real human 8 seconds and two failed attempts.
That's not a glitch. That's the end of an era.
For twenty years, CAPTCHAs have been the internet's answer to a simple question: are you a real person? The method was clever at the time. Give humans a puzzle that machines couldn't solve. Crosswalks. Fire hydrants. Blurry text. If you could solve it, you were probably human.
The problem is obvious now. Machines solve puzzles better than we do. Faster, more accurately, at scale. Every CAPTCHA variant released in the last five years has been defeated within months. AI doesn't struggle with crosswalks. It identifies them instantly, then clicks with the precision of a surgeon.
So the question becomes: if puzzles can't prove you're human anymore, what can?
The answer was always there
Think about what actually proves a person is real in the physical world. Not puzzles. Not passwords. Not clicking images of traffic lights.
It's institutional trust.
When you walk into a bank, they don't ask you to solve a puzzle. They verify your identity through documentation backed by other institutions. Your government issued an ID. Your bank holds your money. These institutions have already done the work of confirming you exist.
The internet skipped this step entirely. Instead of building on institutional trust, it invented puzzles. And for two decades, that was good enough.
It's not good enough anymore.
What if verification wasn't about puzzles at all?
We asked a different question. Instead of "can this user solve a puzzle?" we asked "is this user backed by a real financial institution?"
That question can't be gamed by AI. There's no neural network that can fabricate a real bank account with a real person's name on it. There's no CAPTCHA farm that can produce verified financial identities at scale. There's no solver service, no browser extension, no workaround.
A real person, connected to a real financial institution, is the one signal that can't be faked.
That's what we built.
How it works
One script tag on any website. A user clicks "Get Verified." In 30 seconds, their identity is confirmed through a secure financial institution connection. The same infrastructure trusted globally for banking and payments.
The user gets a verified identity and a trust tier. The site gets confirmation that the user is real. No personal financial data is shared with the site. Ever.
Three lines of code:
<script src="https://stampted.com/stampt-verify.js"></script>
<div id="verify"></div>
<script>
StamptVerify.init({ publishableKey: 'pk_live_...' }).mount('#verify');
</script>
That's the entire integration. Smaller than a Google Analytics snippet.
The part nobody talks about
Here's what makes this fundamentally different from every other verification method: persistence.
reCAPTCHA has no memory. Every site, every session, every visit; you start from zero. You've solved ten thousand crosswalk puzzles in your life and Google still doesn't trust you on the next one.
Bank-verified identity is persistent. Verify once. Trusted on every site that uses the same infrastructure. Forever. The more sites that adopt it, the more pre-verified users exist, the less friction for everyone.
This is the network effect that CAPTCHAs never had and never could have. A puzzle doesn't get easier because you solved it somewhere else. A verified identity does.
What verified identity unlocks
Once you know a user is real and financially verified, you can do things CAPTCHAs never could.
Age verification that actually works. Not a checkbox. Not a "please enter your birthday" form that every 13-year-old lies on. Real, bank-verified age confirmation. Pass or fail. No date of birth exposed. Legally defensible compliance for alcohol, cannabis, gambling, tobacco, and age-restricted content.
States are passing age verification laws faster than platforms can comply. Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Utah, and more have already enacted requirements. The checkbox era is ending. The compliance era is beginning.
Financial trust scoring. A 1-100 score that answers a question no CAPTCHA ever could: should I trust this person with a high-value interaction? Is this buyer real before they checkout? Is this applicant financially qualified before they apply? Is this guest worth the VIP treatment before they arrive?
Fraud prevention by design. Card testing, fake signups, scalper bots, duplicate accounts; they all fail when every action requires a verified identity. You don't detect fraud after the fact. You prevent it at the source.
Who needs this
The honest answer: everyone who uses a CAPTCHA today. But some use cases are more urgent than others.
E-commerce. Card testing costs merchants billions annually. Verified buyers eliminate the problem entirely. A verified person is far less likely to commit fraud; and if they do, you know exactly who they are.
Cannabis, alcohol, and gambling. Age verification is now legally required in an increasing number of jurisdictions. A checkbox is not compliance. Bank-verified age confirmation is.
Dating and social platforms. Every fake profile, every catfish, every bot farm exists because platforms can't verify who's real. When every account is tied to a verified financial identity, the ecosystem changes overnight.
Ticketing. One verified person, one purchase. Scalper bots can't operate when every transaction requires a verified human behind it.
Marketplaces. Know your seller's trust level before the transaction, not after the dispute.
Hospitality and gaming. Know a guest's financial profile before they arrive. Segment marketing by verified capacity instead of assumptions. Target offers to the right people at the right tier.
The uncomfortable truth about reCAPTCHA
reCAPTCHA isn't free. Google offers it at no monetary cost, but the trade is your users' behavioral data. Every interaction, every mouse movement, every browsing pattern is captured and fed into Google's advertising infrastructure.
Your users are the product. The CAPTCHA is the mechanism.
Bank-verified identity has no data trade. The site gets a verification status and a trust tier. The user's financial data stays encrypted and private. No behavioral tracking. No advertising profile. No third-party data harvesting.
Privacy isn't a feature. It's the architecture.
The numbers
The identity verification market is projected to reach $18 billion by 2027. The CAPTCHA market represents $12 billion in annual spend. Age verification is a $3 billion market being forced into existence by regulation. Online fraud costs $48 billion annually.
These aren't separate markets. They're layers of the same problem: the internet doesn't have a trust layer. It has puzzles, checkboxes, and hope.
Building that trust layer; real, verified, persistent, global; is what infrastructure companies do.
Try it
We built this to be the simplest identity verification on the internet.
If you're a developer: add one script tag and you're live. Test mode available with no real bank connections needed during development.
If you're a site owner: plugins available for major CMS platforms. No code required.
If you're a business with a database: every user you verify joins a global verified network. Precision marketing, financial segmentation, and network revenue follow.
Documentation: stampted.com/docs
Product: stampted.com/verify
Trust badges: stampted.com/badge
50 free verifications per month. No credit card required.
The age of puzzles is over. The age of verified trust has begun.
*STAMPT is trust infrastructure for the internet. Bank-verified identity that works across every site, every platform, every industry. Learn more at stampted.com.
