Now that 2024 has come to a close, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the digital identity landscape and evaluate how the year’s trends have shaped the market. In our annual tradition, we look back on our predictions at the start of the year and assess how they measure up against reality. This year, instead of rating each prediction individually, we’ll focus on the major industry trends and discuss how our forecasts align with them.
2024 has been a transformative year for Liminal as well. As a technology company offering market and competitive intelligence through our Link Platform, we’ve empowered businesses with actionable insights to navigate these trends. Let’s explore the major takeaways from 2024 and how our predictions fared.
The Big Picture: 2024 Reflections in Digital Identity
The cybersecurity and digital identity space continued to experience rapid growth, innovation, and regulatory scrutiny in 2024. Key trends included:
- Trust & Safety Become Core to Platform Integrity: Social media platforms prioritized Trust & Safety initiatives, with age assurance and age verification emerging as critical capabilities to address regulatory pressures, user demands, and platform integrity.
- Convergence of Identity and Cybersecurity: The increasing sophistication of identity-based threats and deepfakes drove the convergence of cybersecurity and identity solutions, with advancements in frameworks, content provenance, and fraud prevention capabilities leading the way.
- Evolving Regulatory Landscapes: Global regulations targeting AI privacy, age assurance, and data usage placed organizations under greater scrutiny, requiring them to balance compliance, innovation, and ethical practices to maintain market credibility.
- Market Consolidation and Innovation: Strategic acquisitions and private equity investments reshaped the identity and fraud markets, with adjacent players like Visa, Experian, and Mastercard driving innovation, while identity-first vendors expanded their market influence.
- The Continued Struggle for Reusable Identity Adoption. Despite the promise of reusable identity networks, slow consumer uptake and market pivots highlight ongoing challenges in achieving scalability and trust for widespread adoption.
These trends underscored the market’s complexity and opportunity, shaping the decisions of buyers, providers, and investors alike.
“2024 marked a pivotal year in the fight for digital trust. Breakthroughs in age assurance, AI-driven deepfake detection, and passkeys laid the foundation for a safer, more authentic online ecosystem. At Liminal, we turned complexity into clarity—empowering businesses to navigate these shifts with confidence and shape the strategies that protect integrity in the digital age.”
– Jennie Berry, Liminal
Revisiting Our 2024 Predictions
Our 2024 predictions, which drew on the collective expertise of the Liminal team, anticipated many of these developments. Here’s how they aligned with the year’s major trends:
- Age Assurance as a Core Pillar for Trust & Safety
- Convergence of Identity and Cybersecurity
- Market Consolidation
- Regulatory Shifts
- Continued Struggle for Reusable Identity Adoption
1. Age Assurance as a Core Pillar for Trust & Safety
Our prediction that major social media platforms would initiate voluntary age verification has proven mostly correct, as platforms like Meta and Snapchat have taken significant steps to enhance age assurance measures, including testing tools such as biometric-based age estimation and document verification to comply with growing regulatory pressures. According to Liminal’s 2024 B2B survey of age assurance practitioners, in regulated sectors, age verification coverage is expected to grow from 60% to 66%, while unregulated industries are moving faster, with adoption rising from 64% to 73% in the next year. This shift reflects the growing recognition of age assurance as essential for Trust & Safety, even outside traditionally regulated areas.
While we anticipated a blow to state-level regulations in the U.S., the outcome has been mixed. We use Link’s Market Monitor to anticipate actionable impacts of proposed legislation, and although the Supreme Court has yet to rule on this issue decisively, recent developments—such as Florida’s new HB 3 bill mandating parental consent for minors under 14 to access social media —demonstrate states’ continued attempts to impose online protections. Internationally, Australia introduced the world-first legislation in its Online Safety Act, which bans children younger than 16 from platforms including X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Age Assurance has emerged as a core focus of our coverage and research this year, driven by its critical role in Trust & Safety initiatives across digital platforms. Throughout the year, we’ve closely tracked market sentiment through buyer surveys, which highlight the growing demand for solutions that balance regulatory compliance, user experience, and platform integrity. The gap between understanding and effectively implementing age assurance regulations presents a significant challenge for businesses, with confusion around the scope of specific regulations being a major issue. 46% of practitioners incorrectly identify the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) – which primarily applies to schools and libraries – as one of the top regulations impacting businesses. Our Link Use Case Explorer includes an analysis of product capabilities and technical features, including a detailed view of how solutions are evolving to meet the stringent requirements of this use case, such as biometric age estimation, data enrichment, and parental consent tools. At the same time, we’ve identified key technology gaps—particularly in accuracy and user experience—that remain opportunities for innovation. By mapping the capabilities of emerging technologies to real-world buyer needs, we’ve gained a clear view of how the market is maturing to address the complexities of age assurance, setting the stage for future advancements that ensure safer digital environments for all users.
2. Convergence of Identity and Cybersecurity
Our predictions regarding the convergence of digital identity and cybersecurity were largely correct, with developments across deepfake mitigation, bot detection, and authentication.
Deepfakes are more prevalent today than ever before due to a combination of technological advancements and increased accessibility to AI-powered tools. The proliferation of generative AI models, such as GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and large language models, has enabled the creation of hyper-realistic audio, video, and image content with minimal expertise or resources. The rapid spread of misinformation on social platforms and the rise of identity-based attacks, such as impersonation fraud and synthetic identities, have made deepfakes an increasingly potent tool for bad actors targeting individuals, organizations, and even nation-states. Solutions that integrate identity verification tools—such as biometric authentication, liveness detection, and digital watermarking—combined with cybersecurity techniques like content provenance, anomaly detection, and cryptographic hashing are essential to detect and authenticate the origin and integrity of digital media. Based on survey data conducted in Liminal’s 2024 Seminar Research Report: The Market for Identity Authorization Networks, 88% of financial services institutions expect GenAI fraud and deepfakes to grow substantially over the next two years. New frameworks and consortiums have emerged to combat deepfakes, and in the Solution Segment for User-Generated Content Moderation within our Liminal Landscape, we are tracking the Content Authenticity Initiative and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which have made progress in establishing technical standards for identifying manipulated media.
Midjourney Image Generations Over Time – Liminal’s 2024 Seminar Research Report: The Market for Identity Authorization Networks
Our prediction that Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation would drive demand for bot detection was incorrect, as Google has decided not to phase out third-party cookies. However, as companies shift toward first-party ad strategies, there remains a heightened requirement to ensure that all website impressions are legitimate. The growing reliance on first-party data amplifies the need for identity-centric approaches to cybersecurity, particularly in bot detection. Automated threats like ad fraud, fake traffic, and click bots can severely undermine the accuracy and value of first-party strategies, impacting advertising ROI and business performance. Organizations are adopting advanced solutions such as behavioral analytics, device fingerprinting, and real-time anomaly detection to differentiate between genuine users and malicious bots to combat this. By ensuring the legitimacy of website impressions, businesses protect their advertising investments and reinforce trust and data integrity in an increasingly privacy-driven digital landscape.
Finally, while passkeys have gained traction, particularly with big tech players like Google and Apple, our prediction remains correct that they remain largely secondary authentication methods rather than primary solutions, as adoption faces challenges in user behavior and enterprise readiness. Passkeys are a form of passwordless authentication that leverages public key cryptography to verify a user’s identity without requiring a traditional password. According to Liminal’s 2024 B2B surveys of authentication practitioners, despite nearly 100% of businesses that have yet to adopt passkeys expressing a willingness to transition to them, only about a third are expecting to do so in the next two years. Our ongoing research on a passwordless future highlights the critical role that CISOs and IT leaders can play in promoting the internal adoption of passkeys within the workforce. We hypothesize that workforce adoption can catalyze widespread customer deployments by proving their effectiveness, ease of use, and security benefits in real-world environments. This workforce-first approach enhances identity-centric cybersecurity by removing the vulnerabilities associated with passwords and helps organizations build trust and familiarity with passkey solutions.
Buyer Barriers to Passwordless Implementation – Liminal’s Q2 2024 Investment Trends Report
3. Market Consolidation
Our predictions around market consolidation were partially correct, with significant activity but slightly different dynamics than anticipated. While at least two publicly traded identity companies did choose to go private—such as Proofpoint’s acquisition by Thoma Bravo and ZeroFox’s buyout by Haveli Investments—the broader trend focused on strategic acquisitions.
Key deals like Visa’s acquisition of Featurespace and Experian’s acquisition of NeuroID and ClearSale highlight how financial giants integrate advanced fraud prevention and behavioral analytics capabilities into their platforms. Mastercard’s acquisition of Recorded Future also points to a growing appetite for cybersecurity and identity intelligence convergence. We also saw Entrust’s acquisition of Onfido for up to $600M, despite prior speculation to IPO over $1B.
However, our expectation that Okta and Ping would aggressively expand into identity verification and fraud prevention—particularly at account opening—was only partially realized. While both expanded capabilities, their focus remained on core IAM/CIAM, leaving traditional identity verification players like Socure, Prove, and others to capture significant market share in fraud prevention and onboarding solutions. The acquisitions and private equity activity seen this year reaffirm that the market is consolidating, but the momentum is being driven by adjacent entrants and strategic investors looking to integrate identity and fraud solutions into larger ecosystems rather than large-scale mergers within the digital identity space.
Market Consolidation – Exit deal volume and size – Liminal’s Q3 2024 Investment Trends Report
4. Regulatory Shifts
Our predictions regarding regulatory shifts were only somewhat correct, particularly in relation to generative AI and its impact on privacy and data advantage. As generative AI adoption surged, organizations faced increasing privacy concerns and regulatory scrutiny. For instance, the EU’s AI Act introduced strict guidelines around data usage, transparency, and accountability in generative AI systems, while jurisdictions like California pushed forward tech regulations to safeguard personal data from misuse in AI training models.
Simultaneously, companies struggling to articulate their unique data advantage in the generative AI space encountered notable market criticism. This was particularly evident with firms unable to differentiate their AI solutions from competitors or justify the quality of their proprietary datasets, leading to investor skepticism and concerns about overinflated claims. These developments reaffirm that regulatory shifts are driving organizations to strike a balance between AI-driven innovation, privacy protections, and transparency, with a clear data advantage increasingly serving as a competitive differentiator.
5. Continued Struggle for Reusable Identity Adoption
Unfortunately, our prediction that reusable identity networks would not gain consumer adoption in 2024 was correct, as significant hurdles around scalability, trust, and consumer behavior persisted. Notably, Mastercard has lost momentum with its ID Network, reflecting the challenges even well-funded, globally recognized players face in driving the adoption of reusable digital identities. Sovrin, a pioneer in self-sovereign identity, is preparing to deprecate its MainNet ledger by April of this year, signaling technological hurdles and a marked reduction in transaction activity. Trinsic, a startup that sought to enable decentralized identity solutions, shifted its focus away from its original vision, citing slow market readiness and unclear demand. These developments underscore the difficulty of achieving network effects, interoperability, and end-user trust required for reusable identity solutions to thrive. While reusable identity networks continue to show promise, particularly in niche ecosystems or regulated environments, the broader market remains hesitant, and adoption struggles have reinforced the need for clearer value propositions, regulatory support, and incentives to drive consumer engagement.
Liminal’s Role in 2024: Turning Complexity into Clarity with Actionable Market and Competitive Intelligence
2024 marked Liminal’s full transformation into a technology company, with our Link Platform at the center of our offerings. Combining human expertise with AI-driven insights provided actionable market and competitive intelligence to practitioners, solution providers, and investors looking for technologies that identify and protect their customers and businesses. Key highlights of our impact include:
- Driving Strategic Decisions: Our platform enabled clients to anticipate market shifts and capitalize on emerging trends.
- Enabling Growth and Compliance: By leveraging Liminal’s research, businesses implemented scalable solutions that balanced innovation with regulatory adherence.
- Building Connections: The Link Platform created a centralized place for buyers and providers to connect, fostering collaboration and unlocking new opportunities.
Liminal remains committed to delivering actionable future intelligence as we move forward, helping our clients stay ahead in an ever-evolving market. Watch out for some bold moves we’re about to make to give our customers an unfair competitive advantage.
As we reflect on the past year, we’re also looking ahead to 2025. Our upcoming blog will explore the predictions shaping the digital identity landscape for the next year, offering a forward-looking perspective grounded in the events and signals we continue to monitor. Together, we can unlock new opportunities and drive meaningful impact in the digital identity space.
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