The first quarter of 2022 in crypto markets was relatively steady with Bitcoin experiencing modest gains at the quarter’s end. Notably, several Fed rate hikes were announced, and the Biden administration issued sweeping executive orders for plans to address crypto regulation. The industry also saw a $4B valuation for Yuga Labs.
Key Milestones
Our Q1 of 2022 was about expanding our reach into permissioned market spaces. In January, we announced a partnership with a leading DeFi infrastructure company, Liquid Meta Capital Holdings Ltd. The purpose of our partnership is to bring trusted, secure permissioned identity services to DeFi and enable Liquid Meta to provide capital liquidity to permissioned dApps. Ultimately, the goal will be to promote the overall adoption of DeFi.
We also continued to build traction in the DeFi space through an integration with Credix Finance. Credix is building a decentralized marketplace to give borrowers in emerging countries access to previously untapped capital. Furthering the impact of this partnership was Credix’s receipt of a hackathon prize for the Project Serum Convergence Hackathon. Their entry was a fully permissioned protocol transfer of assets, using Civic Pass.
As NFT marketplaces continued to implement and refine permissioning in their marketplaces, we took steps to improve the Civic Pass experience, starting with improving the minting process on Candy Machine. We tightened up our infrastructure, migrated CAPTCHA providers and fixed bugs on the minting code. The result is a Civic Pass CAPTCHA experience that’s noticeably faster and smoother.
Together with our partner, Snowcrash, a new NFT marketplace from Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, we announced an integration of our identity verification protocol in order to curb bot manipulation on the Snowcrash platform. Civic brought seasoned experience to the integration, having protected more than 200 mints, helped nearly 100,000 buyers successfully mint NFTs, and blocked a staggering 1,000,000+ bots from attempting purchases.
Finally, we expanded our reach by integrating with other blockchains. Casper Labs is a network designed to accelerate enterprise and developer adoption of its proof-of-stake blockchain technology built off the Casper CBC specification. We’ve partnered with Casper to give dApps the ability to meet permissioning requirements. Our partner, Metacask, is the first dApp to showcase the integration.
Civic in the News
In the fourth quarter, Civic accumulated a total online readership of more than 77 million viewers, as a result of press releases and news media coverage. Our partnership announcement with Snowcrash was covered by Decrypt, The Crypto Times, Aliens and DC Forecasts. Our Liquid Meta announcement was picked up by Yahoo, Authority, Street Insider and Crypto News BTC. And, Cryptopedia published an overview of our company.
We also participated in events. Our CEO, Chris Hart, spoke at the Digital Currency Summit. We sponsored and participated in Solana Hacker houses in Prague, Chicago and Seattle. We closed out the quarter by announcing our Snowcrash partnership at NFT LA.
Coming Soon
As the market for NFTs continues to develop, we’ve been building out opportunities for dApps to have permissioned spaces. This work will result in an improved framework for Civic Pass in the market by fostering easier adoption, integration and usage. You can expect to see the initial stages of this revised framework come to life in Q2.
Additionally, we are very excited about the tools we are currently building to enable the ultimate owners of identity, the individual, manage their web3 identities cross wallet, cross-chain and in a self sovereign model.
We are already speeding ahead in Q2 and are looking forward to making announcements in the coming months. Stay tuned!