In this interview, we sit down with Tange Tata Fombar to discuss Safe Trade Services, a platform providing identity verification for P2P transactions where users can verify once and use it everywhere for six months. Safe Trade Services What does Safe Trade Services do? And why is now the time for it to exist? Identity Verification for P2P Transactions. Verify once, use everywhere for 6 months. Now’s a good time for Safe Trade Services to exist because the rapid rise of AI and deepfakes makes robust, privacy-preserving identity verification more critical than ever to prevent digital fraud. What is your traction to date? How many people does Safe Trade Services reach? My current reach is Tens of thousands through organic sources like Blog Posts, Search Engines, Social Media, etc. But it has a potential to reach Billions of people in a very short space of time. The service has a free and a paid plan so anyone can use it. Who does your Safe Trade Services serve? What’s exciting about your users and customers? Anyone who uses the internet and wants to protect themselves from scammers and fraudsters. Companies that want to verify their users without handling their ID documents. This protocol has the potential to replace Recapcha verification since bots cannot have government issued IDs. What technologies were used in the making of Safe Trade Services? And why did you choose ones most essential to your techstack? Safe Trade Services is built utilizing Spring-boot, Postgres and Redis. This setup allows us to build a robust full stack application that can scale both horizontally and vertically. Spring security is top tier in the industry. It offers secure and encrypted communication between server and client which highly required for this startup. Also, we use multiple third party companies for the verification process. This gives our users the choice of who to verify with. Some of these companies are Veriff, Persona, Didit, Idenfy, Sumsub etc. These companies were selected because they provide a highly secure and robust verification processes while ensuring user privacy and trust through advanced cryptographic verification methods. Most of them are already widely used, for example the world's most valuable private startup as of late 2025, OpenAI, which has a valuation of approximately $500 billion, uses Persona for it's Identity verification. What is traction to date for Safe Trade Services? Around the web, who’s been noticing? Safe Trade Services is currently in the pre-launch phase, building the infrastructure for its official release. The project is strategically designed for exponential, viral growth; as sellers get verified, they will require their buyers to do the same, organically expanding the network of trusted users. Safe Trade Services scored a 43 proof of usefulness score (https://proofofusefulness.com/report/safe-trade-services) - how do you feel about that? Needs reassessed or just right? https://proofofusefulness.com/report/safe-trade-services I think It can do better. The Handshake we invented is a vital utility that if widely adopted will eliminate most scams that exist today. Most social media platforms provide a blue tick to show that a user is verified but the identity of the real person behind the account is not disclosed. This leads to impersonation scams and Identity theft. Scammers always operates from a point of trust. This is why they need to impersonate others in the first place. I think It can do better. The Handshake we invented is a vital utility that if widely adopted will eliminate most scams that exist today. Most social media platforms provide a blue tick to show that a user is verified but the identity of the real person behind the account is not disclosed. This leads to impersonation scams and Identity theft. Scammers always operates from a point of trust. This is why they need to impersonate others in the first place. What excites you about Safe Trade Services's potential usefulness? It protects people from potential ills of Artificial Intelligence. The better AI gets at mimicking human behavior, the more scams and fraud will prevail. Deepfake is already a thing now. We can't trust video calls anymore because AI can tamper with the images in real time. We all need one platform that we can trust with our real IDs, then all the other platforms can verify their users by connecting to this platform, instead of having to force users to undergo the KYC process on every single platform. The user simply submits a key that can be verified with a secure handshake. The handshake is what makes this platform secure. Walk us through your most concrete evidence of usefulness. Not vanity metrics or projections - what's the one data point that proves people genuinely need what you've built? First of all, the biggest hurdle that this platform solves is that: people are tired of having to go through the KYC process on every single platform. It's risky because they share their private and sensitive documents on multiple occasions to different companies. We are offering something much more simpler, verify once and use every where on the internet for 6-months. How do you measure genuine user adoption versus "tourists" who sign up but never return? What's your retention story? When a user verifies their ID with Safe Trade Services, they get access to unlimited handshakes. Because we offer unlimited handshakes even for free plans, we do not store the handshake data in our database. Instead we use a cache that is wiped after 15 minutes. We only store the number of handshakes made. Genuine user adoption can be measured by the number of handshakes made over a period of time. If we re-score your project in 12 months, which criterion will show the biggest improvement, and what are you doing right now to make that happen? The growth rate of our user base will have the greatest improvement. Currently I am building a discord bot that will host a dating game (Pop The Balloon or Find Love) on any server that it is added to for free (Here's the invite link of the discord bot: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1477233164446466101). Because the online dating world is a very regulated area, I will use this platform to verify the players and users won't feel uncomfortable when required to verify their IDs. After that, i will tell the players that they can also use this verification to prove that they are real anywhere on the internet by submitting their email addresses which will trigger an email with the link to their verified status sent to them. Once i have a good user base on Discord, I will propose bonuses in the dating game for players who invite others to verify their IDs. This will create a viral growth loop. How Did You Hear About HackerNoon? Share With Us About Your Experience With HackerNoon. ChatGPT suggested Hackernoon to me when i asked it for the top ten free blogs where I could grow my startup. Since Safe Trade Services is currently in the pre-launch phase, how do you plan to kickstart the initial network effect to get those first critical sellers verified? Once i have grown my user base on Discord, I will make partnerships with moderators of popular subreddits like r/hardwareswap, r/appleswap etc. to require this verification for sellers and buyer. You mentioned the potential to reach billions of users quickly. What specific marketing strategies or partnerships are you prioritizing to scale from your initial reach to mass global adoption? I want to replace Recaptcha totally. My users all have government issued IDs and don't need to pass a Recaptcha test to proof that they are human. The current model is that companies pay google for the use of the Racaptcha API. I will offer my service to companies for free. Now depending on the company and the type of resource that the user is trying to access, the company will require different levels of verification from the user. For example, if a user just wants to create an ordinary user account, the company may require the free verification plan. But if the user want to create a developer account where they get to receive API keys and more, the company may require a paid verification plan as the paid verification plan come with higher security. Given the increasing threat of AI and deepfakes you mentioned, how does your protocol ensure that the initial KYC verification process itself cannot be spoofed by advanced AI before issuing the secure handshake key? We use multiple third party companies for the verification process. Some of these companies are Veriff, Persona, Didit, Idenfy, Sumsub etc. They offer background checks, NFC scanning of chips in government issued documents, Business verification, and more. These services are not free and some take weeks to go through because they are manually inspected. It's up to the user to get verified and proof that they are real to access the resource the company has put behind the verification.
