An update on Civic Wallet
Our vision has always been to give people a digital identity they own and control. Last fall, we reached an important milestone in realizing our vision: launching Civic Wallet to a private group of beta testers. The Civic Wallet is a digital wallet that combines your verified identity with the ability to pay with both crypto and fiat.
We’ve been hard at work building, testing and tweaking the app, making sure that it’s ready for our waitlist of nearly 120,000 supporters around the world. Over the past few months, we’ve listened closely to and incorporated a lot of great feedback from our users. As a result, we’ve further refined our product roadmap based on what we’ve heard.
We’re so proud of Civic Wallet and can’t wait to share it with you. We’ll provide more updates on our progress soon.
Highlights from 2019
As we look back on how Civic has evolved over the past year, the mission that powers us as a team remains unchanged: we remain laser-focused on providing everyone with a digital identity that they own and control. We’ve also been fortunate to amass valuable learnings and insights along the way to broaden our understanding of how to integrate identity verification into various real-life use cases:
Civic for age verification
Most businesses need reliable and trustworthy identity verification solutions, but some of them need it specifically to sell age-restricted goods and services to consumers. With this insight, Civic saw an opportunity to merge identity verification with payment to help these businesses scale their operations. The result? Vending machines implemented with Civic technology that will allow consumers to provide proof of identity and also pay for their beer or other age-restricted products with one quick QR code scan straight from their Civic Wallet.
We showcased our Civic-enabled vending machines at South by Southwest (SXSW) to an enthusiastic crowd of attendees that understand what a game-changer it is to skip the wait for a bartender at music festivals and baseball stadiums. Less time spent standing in line means more time to soak in your favorite moments.
We then took our vending machines to The NAMA Show, a yearly gathering of players in the automated retail industry. This audience of vending machine owners, operators, and distributors immediately understood the impact of being able to sell age-restricted goods from a machine without requiring a human to stand by and check IDs. A vendor can both save on labor and scale massively with Civic-enabled vending machines. We inked partnerships with 12 automated retailers, all of whom recognized the positive impact of Civic’s technology on their business operations.
Civic for access management
We were excited to bring Civic for visitor access management to Johnson Controls (JCI), a Fortune 500 company. Identity verification by Civic enables JCI to check visitors in and out of their office buildings quickly and accurately while minimizing security risk. They are getting ready to go live with their first building, and we couldn’t be more excited to enable their newest products with secure verified identity for visitor access management.
Identity.com spun off from Civic
We always knew that Identity.com would have its own—pardon the pun—identity. Today, Identity.com is operating independently as a 501(c)(4), a nonprofit organization to promote social welfare. Identity.com continues to operate with the goal of helping decentralize the world’s personal information and providing a marketplace where people can transact, making it seamless and secure for people to get control of their personal information.
Looking ahead to 2020
The evolution of our vision for identity into Civic Wallet reflects our continued focus on tying identity and payment together into one seamless app at your fingertips. As more of our personal lives migrate onto our phones, we want to build a wallet that is secure, functional, and easy for anyone to use. Our goal is to take the best parts of crypto and make it even more safe and accessible, to be just as user-friendly as your most-used apps, and to be as indispensable in your daily life as your phone itself.
We have some exciting news to share with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, thanks for staying with us on this journey.