What is Civic? On-demand, secure, and lower-cost identity verification services powered by the blockchain.

Civic is building an ecosystem that is designed to facilitate on-demand, secure and low-cost access to identity verification (“IDV”) services via the blockchain, such that background and personal information verification checks will no longer need to be undertaken from the ground up every time.

Civic is a secure identity platform. It’s like a digital wallet that bridges your physical and cyber credentials.

The company suggests that its model can ensure “Proof-of-data ownership” to help people protect themselves against identity fraud. Organizations will be able to trust users without the need to retrieve and store data. “This new paradigm will ultimately reduce the risk of data breaches and dramatically increase the cost of committing fraud.”

What if Civic gets hacked?

Civic doesn't keep PII (personally identifiable information) for their users on file. Instead, data is stored within the Civic app on the user's mobile device. Transactions may not be initiated without a biometric proof of identity, such as a facial, voice recognition, or thumb print. This ensures that only users can access their sensitive information.

This security is further enhanced by third-party wallet software. Like other blockchains, all transactions on the SIP must be authenticated with a private key that acts as a password. Civic does not have the private keys used by any of their users on file, so hacking the company would be of little benefit.

Who is Behind Civic

The man behind Civic is Vinny Lingham. He’s a South African entrepreneur perhaps best known for being on Shark Tank South Africa. He previously founded Gyft, the digital gift card provider, which was sold to First Data Corp in 2014 for somewhere between $50 and $100 million. He also founded Yola which is a website builder and hosting platform.

Real world examples

You can log into Wikihow with Civic.

You can buy a beer with Civic. Check out the Anheuser-Busch InBev vending machine. The Civic app enables you to verify your identity using a document that contains your date of birth. The app then interacts with a QR code on the vending machine, and if you are over 21 (legal drinking age in the US) it dispenses a can of beer.

Why the need for a token?

I always find the explenation by Monika Van Zyl Director of Waves African Exchange to be quite easy to understand.

Think of it this way. Lets say you are hosting a rock concert.

You could say "Hey, we want to sell the privilege of watching the show. Just pitch up at the door and we will try to guess how much you're willing to pay to view, but there is no ticket system and we dont know what the capacity will be and people must just fend for themselves." Of course you can just make people pay, but you're not managing the system in a way for you to make good business decisions.

If you sell tickets that represent seats to the show... you can learn more about the supply and demand for the concert, and make good decisions to ensure customers are happy. You will know beforehand if your ticket is overpriced or underpriced and if you have too many seats or too little. Tokenization helps businesses analyze these very hard to measure metrics.

Speculators or traders are like ticket scalpers. They buy up all the tickets on the first day and try to sell those tickets for a profit. They manipulate the supply and squeeze customers to try and find the perfect price.

But if your main act sucks, ticket scalpers might be left with a lot of unsold tickets and now drop the price to try and recover their losses.

So your job as an investor is to research the company and find a business that will actually have a lot of clients who want to use their services. The only difference is it takes longer to get a company like CVC to market than it does to set up a Rihanna concert in the park. The time scales are different.

Token economy example

There is a very easy to understand explanation by Robert Bartus that I tend to explain to people who are new to the crypto world.

Imagine there is only 1 cvc token in existence. It is worth $1. It does 10 age verifications at 10 cents each. And you are using it every day and you need exactly 10 age verifications, so you buy 1 cvc and spend it, every single day.

Now your friend sees that you are saving money by doing age verifications that way and he also wants to use it like you are, and he goes to buy it. But there is only 1 civic token, and you are already using it every single day. What will happen?

Well, both of you can buy it, but only half of the cvc token each. So that half civic token is now enough for 10 age verifications for 10 cents each. So 1 cvc token is now providing 20 age verifications at 10 cents and it now costs $2.

Next week comes a third user of cvc tokens... if he uses it exactly how you two are using it, then a civic token will now cost $3.

Bottome line: The more companies use civic tokens (adoption) the higher the price of a single cvc token will be.

Civic Partners

Civic’s current partners include Augmentors, Bayonet Technologies, Bankcoin.global, BnkToTheFuture, BitGo, C.O.S.S., Doc.ai, Injii, Jaxx, Keynua, Lykke, Propy, REIDAO, ShapeShift, RSK, StockTwits, SweepSouth, TokenMarket, Turo, Inc., WikiHow, Xapo, and Yola.

How to buy Civic Tokens

I wrote a full article here on How to buy Civic Tokens using Shapeshift