Glide.id unites US carriers on SIM cryptography to kill the OTP

A SIM-anchored authentication platform now spans AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, targeting a fraud wave costing US consumers $15.9bn in 2025.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Mon, 17 August 2026

A brightly lit data center hallway extends into the distance, flanked by symmetrical rows of dark server racks displaying numerous yellow and blue indicator lights and bundles of colorful cables.

Glide.id, a digital identity security company backed by Fidelity International Strategic Ventures and Singtel Innov8, has launched the public beta of MagicalAuth across all three major US carriers, replacing SMS-based one-time passwords with cryptographic authentication rooted in the SIM card already inside a customer's device. The simultaneous alignment of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon around a single identity architecture is rare, and it signals that the telecoms sector now sees identity infrastructure as a core network service, not an add-on.

The timing is deliberate. US consumers lost $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, up from just over $12 billion the prior year, according to Federal Trade Commission data cited by Glide.id. Account takeover fraud alone accounts for nearly a third of reported business fraud losses in the country, per TransUnion's H2 2025 Global Fraud Report. The proximate cause, in most cases, is the six-digit SMS code: a mechanism designed before AI-powered voice cloning, deepfakes and large-scale social engineering became routine attack vectors.

From SMS to SIM: how the architecture shifts

MagicalAuth works by issuing a cryptographic challenge that can only be resolved by the private key embedded in the carrier-issued SIM. No code is transmitted, intercepted or socially engineered. The underlying principle mirrors chip-and-PIN payment cards, where possession of the physical token, rather than knowledge of a secret, is the proof of identity. The result, Glide.id says, is that financial institutions can verify a customer at login or during a payment transaction without asking them to do anything at all.

"SMS OTPs were never designed to withstand AI, they were built for a world where the biggest threat was a forgotten password. That world is gone," said Eran Haggiag, Founder and CEO of Glide.id. "The fix was already built into every SIM card; we just had to turn it on."

The company reports strong demand from major US financial institutions, though it has not named specific banking partners. It already has carrier integrations live in Germany, the UK and Spain, with Canada and further markets planned through 2026.

The convergence read-across: fintech, telecoms and AI fraud collide

For cross-sector strategists, the more significant story here is structural. Banks and fintechs have spent years trying to solve the authentication problem at the application layer, through biometrics, behavioural analytics and hardware tokens. Glide.id's approach inverts that logic: the trust anchor moves to the network layer, owned by carriers, not by the financial institution or the device manufacturer. That repositions telecoms operators as critical infrastructure providers for financial services security, a role that sovereign and institutional investors in both sectors should factor into their capital allocation models.

The AI dimension compounds this shift. As generative AI lowers the cost and raises the sophistication of social engineering attacks, authentication systems that rely on shared secrets, any transmitted code or knowledge-based verification, face accelerating obsolescence. The regulatory pressure is already building: the EU's revised Payment Services Directive and emerging US guidelines on digital identity are moving in the direction of cryptographic proofs of possession rather than knowledge-based checks. MagicalAuth's carrier-native architecture positions it ahead of that regulatory curve.

The investor syndicate behind Glide.id reflects the cross-sector thesis directly. Crosspoint Capital (cybersecurity-focused), Fidelity International Strategic Ventures (financial services) and Singtel Innov8 (telecoms) represent three of the four sectors the platform sits at the intersection of. The open question for the market is whether the carrier alignment holds at scale internationally, where fragmented carrier ecosystems and differing regulatory regimes around SIM provisioning could slow the platform's ambition to reach billions of consumers globally.