Civic – Secure Identity Platform

https://www.civic.com/

Civic is secure identity platform build on top of blockchain and Ethereum virtual machine. Serial Entrepreneur Vinny Lingham is the founder of Civic.  Vinny previously co-founded Gyft, which got acquired by First Data Corporation.  On July 23, 2017 Civic had an public ICO token sale and as successfully raised $ 33 million. The Civic tokens are ERC-20 compatible tokens. The token is called Civic Token or “CVC”. The link to white paper is here. Civic sold 33% of their 1 billion CVC token in the ICO to the public.

Current Marketcap of Civic Token or CVC is whopping $202 million. The CVC token trading can be monitored at CoinMarketCap.com.

Civic is trying to disrupt the existing market of Identity protection and verification with the power of cryptography and blockchains. The existing players in current market are LifeLock, IndentityGuard etc for identity protection.

It claims to reduce down the cost of Identity Verification for all the stake holders by storing PII (Personal Identity Information, PFI (Personal Financial Information) and PHI (Personal Health Information) encrypted in the blockchain.

Version 1 of Civic already is a simple working model of their basic identity verification platform.It is called Civic Secure Identity Platform (SIP) which users can access by downloading Civic App through app store. The current Civic Application verifies and stores email address and phone number of a user. Civic App’s Identity partners can request the Identity information through a QR code.

Version 2 , brings in the Ecosystem which will make use of Civic token. Users will get Civic Token or CVC as an incentive to use the product. There will be 3 entities in this new eco-system Validators, Users and Service Providers. Validators would be Banks, Government etc, who validate and attest an identity. Service Providers are the companies who need to verify an identity. Service Providers need to spend Civic Token or CVC to get the User validated from any of the cheapest Validators.

The good:

• The central nature of storing users private data has single point of failure, when the data gets breached.
• Not all companies and stake holders might have enough resources to protect and secure customers private personal information.
• Customers will no longer be required to repeatedly fill lengthy identity verification forms . Which will definitely save time and resources for the customer.
• This might reduce the overhead for companies by securely storing Identity records in the blockchains through smart contracts.
• Cryptography in a decentralized architecture will make data corruption and tampering thing of the past.
• Re-use of the existing attested verification will improve customer experience , with newer ways to share personal data to 3rd parties.

The bad:

• The company has raised significant amount of money for a huge valuation, mostly on bases of a basic MVP.
• Since there is no central authority managing or updating your records, it might be complicated in case of unconventional situations for customers. For example in case of identity theft, data breach, updating incorrect data etc.
• A smart contract mistake or bug can cause significant leak throughout the entire Civic system, which might take significant time to fix .
• Who is the target customer here? And if its users, will this be easy for users to adopt this new way of blockchain verification?
• Certain enterprises/companies have terms and conditions for customer verification. To make them change their terms and condition and trust the blockchain pre-existing verification might be a up hill battle.
• Regarding Electronic Health Records, it has a HIPAA compliance complications which will be a road block in decentralized information storage.
• Immutability and Irreversibility of the blockchain can be a boon and a curse at the same time.  If there is identity theft of a user and they need correction to their existing record, blockchains might make it extremely complicated to fix their existing records.
• Changes to identity verification blocks are based consensus, that means that sometimes majority network can deny a valid identity change, and this needs to be addressed in the current solution.
• Civic will need to setup multiple identity partnerships with existing companies to start using its technology.Its a two sided market challenge.
• This entire new eco-system can be complicated for Users.
• Multiple changes or additions to a attested PII , will require more GAS or CVC token.