What is Relay?
Relay is Persona’s privacy-preserving verification product. Instead of collecting identity data and handing it back to you, Relay confirms one specific claim about a user, such as whether they meet an age threshold or whether a real person is present, and returns only the result.
You get the answer you need to enforce your policy without your systems ever holding the underlying personal information. Once a claim result is produced, Persona deletes the verification data used to produce it.
Most verification systems tie identity to activity: the same party sees who someone is and what they are doing. Relay separates those two things by design.
Why teams use Relay
Platforms are being asked to verify more about their users while holding less of their data. Age assurance and online safety rules are expanding across markets, automated and synthetic activity is getting harder to spot, and the cost of storing sensitive personal information keeps climbing.
Relay is built for that squeeze. It gives you three things:
- Confirm what you need, not a full identity. A claim result answers a narrow eligibility question without routing every user through a full identity verification flow.
- Start from a pre-built approach. Each claim type already encodes the level of assurance and the verification methods used to evaluate it, so you are not designing that logic yourself for every market.
- Keep verification separate from your application. Persona owns the verification experience, and your systems receive only the eligibility result.
For your users, the trade is just as direct. They can confirm something specific about themselves without linking that check to what they are doing on your site, and without sharing more than the question requires.
How it works
When a user reaches a gated experience, Relay runs a verification flow for the claim type you asked for. When the flow finishes, you receive a pass or fail result, without the identity data behind it.
Relay is built on Privacy Pass, an open IETF standard. Privacy Pass cryptographically separates the step where verification happens from the step where you collect the result, so no single party ever sees both who a user is and what they are doing. See Privacy Pass tokens for how that works in practice.
What keeps the two sides separate
Four properties hold the arrangement together:
- Minimal disclosure. Only the data needed to answer the claim question is collected and evaluated.
- Claim results only. You receive a single eligibility result and nothing more.
- Data deletion. Persona deletes the verification data once the claim result is produced.
- Double-blind architecture. The separation between you and Persona is cryptographic, not just a policy commitment.
Where do you find Relay in the Dashboard?
Relay runs inside your own product rather than in the Persona Dashboard, so the Dashboard is where you look things up rather than where you watch verifications happen.
Navigate to the Dashboard and click on Relay > Claim Types. That page lists every claim type available to you, with its ID, description, supported use cases, and verification methods. The ID is the value your integration passes when it creates a Relay session, and you can copy it directly from the table.
Relay does not create records in your Dashboard the way Inquiries and Verifications do. Your integration stores each claim result, which becomes your audit trail. See Integrating Relay for how to set that up.
See Relay running
Persona hosts a public demo at explore.withpersona.com/relay. It is a sample signup flow with a working Relay integration, and an activity panel that shows each step as it happens, including the session, the Privacy Pass, and the claim result. You can also switch the panel to a technical view to see the same steps as SDK calls, gateway requests, or raw API requests.
What happens when a user cannot be verified
If a user cannot complete verification, the claim result tells you the requirement could not be confirmed. What happens next is your decision. Relay provides an assurance signal; it does not enforce your whole policy.
Most teams pick from these options:
- Let the user proceed anyway, based on their own risk tolerance.
- Offer another route, such as a full identity verification flow using Inquiries.
- Send the case to a support team for a human decision.
- Block access, if your policy requires a confirmed result.
Plans Explained
Relay by plan
| Startup Program | Essential Plan | Growth Plan | Enterprise Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relay | Available | Available | Available | Available |