Civic (CVC)

Identity platform

Civic

Type	Token, Secure Identity Platform
Total supply	1.000.000.000

Basics

• Announced on:
• Mainnet release:
• Based in: San Fransisco (7-2022)
• Network Layer, one of the possible building blocks on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
• From their FAQ:

“An identity management service that allows you to protect and authorize the use of your identity in real time. We also offer additional features to help protect your identity such as credit report alerting, identity fraud coverage, and access to 24/7 fraud support.”

“A Standard Civic membership costs just a few dollars a month and provides what we believe are the core features necessary to secure your identity. See our pricing page for more info on what each membership includes. Civic also maintains a free plan for anybody who wishes to join that gives basic protection against loss from ID theft.”

• In 2018, Civic acquired the domains Identity.com and Identity.org. They are currently (7-2019) in the final stages of establishing a non-profit foundation, Identity.org, and moving forward, Identity.org will be the organization responsible for the identity verification marketplace outlined in their initial Token Sale Whitepaper. The marketplace has been rebranded as Identity.com.
• Update (20-9-2019):

"Today, we are excited to announce that moving forward, Identity.com will be operating independently as a 501(c)(4), a nonprofit organization to promote social welfare. The vision for Identity.com has always been to operate independently from Civic, and in fact, one-third of the CVC tokens were allocated for distribution to incentivize participation in the ecosystem at the time of the token sale. Now, with the official launch of Identity.com as a nonprofit, Civic is transferring the incentive tokens to Identity.com and partners, like wikiHow and Coinbase Earn. Civic will remain the largest holder of CVC tokens for the time being, with two-thirds of our 330M tokens currently unlocked. We want to reiterate that we have no intention to sell our tokens at this time."

Audits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Bugs/Exploits

• From Decrypt (31-7-2022):

"In December, Civic announced that it had “verified” the Big Daddy Ape Club through its Verified by Civic Pass program. At the time, the program required verifying: control of the project’s Twitter handle, control of the project’s domain, and the identity of the project founder, including ID documents and a 3D face scan.

But the Big Daddy Ape Club still turned out to be fake."

Governance

• Has no on-chain governance according to Messari (20-3-2021).

Treasury

• Has no on-chain treasury according to Messari (20-3-2021).

Token

Launch

• Had a 33M token sale in June 2017. The CEO Vinny Lingham once said in his CVC telegram group that the Civic Shareholders hold 33% of the CVC's tokens (has also been mentioned in this blog post (20-9-2019) of them).

Token allocation

• From Messari (20-3-2021):

"Civic completed a token sale in June 2017, which raised $33 million in bitcoin and ether at a price of $0.10 per CVC. A total of one billion CVC was created at the start of the project, allocated as follows:

1. 33% were sold during the sale. A total of 500 buyers participated in the sale with 22% of the total supply allocated to large buyers during a pre-sale and 11% sold during the public portion of the sale. No discounts were offered for either portion of the sale. In an attempt to create a fair distribution Civic required sales participants to create an account with civic to verify identity, limiting the ability to game the sale by creating multiple profiles for the same person. Tokens were allocated to participants on a random basis, with no reference to who was “first in line”.
2. 33% was allocated to the Company, vesting yearly over three years
3. 1% was used by the company to cover the costs of the token sale.
4. 33% was allocated to a fund controlled by Civic that will use the tokens to incentivize participation in the network."

Utility

• Cvc could be used as a way to get some discounts. Again speculation.
• Identity.com runs on the CVC token.

Coin Distribution

• 33% of the token supply is held (20-3-2021) within the Civic MultiSig, after this address it is mainly unknown addresses, the next biggest one holds 6% and two addresses of 4.9%.

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed here.

Implementations

• Built on: Ethereum and has a Solana Github repository (20-3-2021).

• From Messari (20-3-2021):

"We currently use a Bitcoin-based blockchain for attestations anchoring and Ethereum as a Smart Contract Platform for implementing Marketplace dynamics between participants of the ecosystem."

How it works

• From Messari (20-3-2021):

"Current services are not fully decentralized and rely on the company to verify a user’s credentials before validating them for use. After verification, an attestation is added to the blockchain providing proof-of-ownership for users. Requestors can confirm that the details being provided by a user belong to that user by checking the attestation provided on the blockchain."

• Keys are generated by a third-party wallet, providing a firewall between Civic and users’ keys.
• Identity data is fully encrypted in the App on the user’s device and can be accessed with biometrics.
• Public identifier for the authenticating authority, hashed identity data, and a flag indicating the data is still valid.
• From Binance Research (21-5-2020):

"The platform enables users to set up their own virtual identity and leverage it for verifications. This is done by using Identity.com's open-source ecosystem that uses a "blockchain-based, decentralized marketplace to connect identity requesters, identity validators, and users to reusable identity verification services".

After the personally identifiable information is verified by identity validators, a reference to the locally stored personally identifiable information is ported onto the blockchain, where service providers can access it with the proper permission from the user."

• From Messari (20-3-2021):

"Reusable identity verification is the core of the platform, which allows people to safely and securely share blockchain-attested information. An attestation is effectively the hash of an underlying element of personal information, plus metadata relating to that hashed element, and it enables users to share the verification of previously audited personal information, their personal information, or both, giving users full control over their data and identity.

We currently use a Bitcoin-based blockchain for attestations anchoring and Ethereum as a Smart Contract Platform for implementing Marketplace dynamics between participants of the ecosystem. The transaction-per-second is defined by the underlying blockchain of Bitcoin and Ethereum. For the Marketplace implementation, we are collecting multiple Marketplace operations within a timeframe into a single Ethereum Transaction in order increase the overall throughput."

Upgrades

• From Decrypt (31-7-2022):

“In a nutshell,” he added, discussing Civic Pass, “it is a token that gets issued to a consumer’s wallet that is non-transferable and also non-visible directly via an explorer, that then attests to some form of verification. Along with uniqueness verification, Civic also rolled out Civic.me, a platform that lets users manage their online identity, NFTs, wallet addresses, and reputation from one place on the blockchain.”

Staking

• Has plans for letting requesters and validators stake, and at one point business users may have to stake cvcs as well, originally was mentioned on 5-2018 in this paper, then in an update on 8-2019 said to have been moved to Q1, 2020.

Compliance

• On how their KYC works:

"The Civic mobile app enables your users to scan and verify their identity documents so you can satisfy your company’s KYC requirements. Leverage trusted 3rd parties in the Identity.com Marketplace to validate personal information with blockchain attestations and store everything locally on the user’s mobile device.

Identity verification is a voluntary information exchange between the User and the Requester. The Civic Secure Identity Platform (SIP) shares authenticated data only with user permission, while the Identity.com Marketplace is a decentralized environment where CVCs are used for attestation payments. An individual downloads the Civic App, establishes an account, and, upon signing up for Requester services, verifies his or her identity on the blockchain and share the authenticated data with Requesters."

Roadmap

• Identity.com roadmap can be found here (22-3-2021).

• Has plans for letting requesters and validators stake, and at one point business users may have to stake cvcs as well, originally was mentioned on 5-2018 in this paper, then in an update on 8-2019 said to have been moved to Q1, 2020.
• Cvc could be used as a way to get some discounts. Again speculation.

• Will launch their wallet together with BitGo in the fall of 2019. "Following the announcement of our pre-registration list for the Civic Wallet, we’ve been building an impressive 100,000-person strong waitlist."

Updated their roadmap on 9-8-2019:

• "Generally speaking, you’ll notice that over the first half of 2019, we’ve made room for more updates with endpoint implementations like Civic, in order to prove the first use cases for the toolkits we have provisioned for Identity.com. This shift in priorities meant we had to postpone publishing the Validation Module code for the Identity Validator Toolkit and the Credential Wallet Toolkit code to Q3 of 2019."
• "Civic is acting as the backup for identity validators within the marketplace, and we are opening this functionality to other identity validators so that they may offer their validation directly to Requesters in a B2B solution. This has been moved to Q4 2019 because the need for backup is currently being met by Civic."
• Wants to use IPFS for decentralised hosting of data. Scheduled for Q1, 2020.

Usage

Projects that use or built on it

• Will be (21-9-2019) used by Brave Browser. Brave announced that it's 'verified publishers' program can use Civic's identity verification and KYC services to confirm their identities and earn BAT tokens
• Has already been used for multiple (relatively unknown) ICO's. (7-2019)
• "Civic has partnered (15-10-2020) with Solana to integrate their decentralised identity solution. The solution is targeted at providing low-cost, scalable identity management in emerging economies that lack the infrastructure."

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Secure ID Platform; Let users safely access your websites and services using the Civic Secure ID.
• Reusable KYC; Satisfy KYC requirements with Civic’s accessible, on-demand solution.
• Automated Retail; Automate and scale your business thanks to smart vending machines with age-verification capabilities.
• ID Codes; Securely verify your business, advisory, or investment relationships.

Cons

• After years of development, is still not fully decentralized, which could indicate that the use case is more difficult than expected (20-3-2021).

Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• Full team can be found [here].

• Lingham, Vinny; CEO & Founder, also board member of the Identity.org Foundation
• Smith, Jonathan; CTO, also board member; has more than 15 years of experience in banking and technology advisory.
• Phillip Shoemaker as the executive director of the Identity.org foundation.
• Gary Benitt; Managing Director, Social Leverage, also board member
• Says they have a team of 50 people, with members working in the United States, South Africa, Brazil, and Germany.

Technical Advisors

On the launch page as technical advisor (as of 31-3-2017):

• Matthew Roszak, Jeff Garzik, Anthony Di Lorio, Juan Benet, Jeffrey Paul and Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar

Technical Partners

On the launch page as technical advisor (as of 31-3-2017):

• Jaxx (gone of the website as of 7-2019), RSK (still on their website as of 7-2019) and Bloq (gone of the website as of 7-2019),

Partners

• As of 7-2019 the list has grown substantially. Some notable mentions are: Bounty0x, Budweiser, Chamber of Digital Commerce, Dentacoin, Lykke, ShapeShift, Tokenly, Trade.io, Xapo
• Client of Argon Group
• TokenMarket (still on their website as of 7-2019)

• Used to be partners with but gone from the website as of 7-2019: BitGo, Operation Stop It, Bankcoin.global, and BNKtotheFuture.com.

• Started running an ION node, as well as added an integration with their validators to the roadmap because they wanted to interconnect with Microsoft’s decentralized platform. 
• "Civic has partnered (15-10-2020) with Solana to integrate their decentralised identity solution. The solution is targeted at providing low-cost, scalable identity management in emerging economies that lack the infrastructure." 

Funding

• Investors:

Social Leverage, Founder Collective, Sound Ventures, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Blockchain Capital, Block Chain Space and Digital Currency Group.