The year started off with a bang as the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum gained momentum at the beginning of 2023, following sharp dips in 2022. At the same time, the price of Solana rallied in Q1 by 140%, compared to December 2022, making gains after the FTX bankruptcy in November. The quarter ended with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and subsequent intervention by the US government, which continues to have lingering ripple effects on the world financial system.
Civic Pass is now available on Ethereum and Polygon
Amid this eventful first quarter, we focused on integrating Civic Pass with Ethereum and Polygon, which was a massive undertaking for us, requiring substantial engineering resources. In reaching this milestone, we are proud to have successfully expanded the capabilities of Civic Pass and further realized our vision of making our products multichain.
We also announced customer portals for developers to try out Civic Pass with their own wallets.
It’s easy to connect a wallet and experience the user flow for issuing a Civic Pass on Ethereum, Polygon and Solana. In this way, we’ve made it far easier for dApps to test out the capabilities of Civic Pass before integrating. We’re also offering more choice in how to configure Civic Pass for our customers: a turnkey solution is available for growing dApps, and a custom solution is available for dApps with enterprise-grade needs.
The Civic Pass Platform is a multichain, wallet-agnostic identity and access management solution (IAM) for smart contracts, dApps, and Web2 companies entering blockchain. Civic Pass may contain specific verification requirements that are either performed by our customers or Civic. We also offer verification add-ons. Civic Pass is now available on five chains: Solana, Casper, Ethereum, Polygon, and XDC.
Civic Pass is similar to, but more flexible than a Soulbound token, which is a non-transferable token that attests to a specific aspect of a person’s identity on-chain. By issuing Civic Passes to their users, dApps may take more control over which wallets are allowed to use their services. Civic Pass is both on-chain and private for the user.
Civic.me & Chainabuse
During the first quarter, we enhanced Civic.me by integrating a reporting feature with Chainabuse, a product from our partners at TRM Labs. Through the new feature, Civic.me users can directly report scammy, spammy NFTs to Chainabuse, the leading platform for reporting crypto malicious activity. Here’s how it works: victims, super-sleuths and investigators self-report evidence to Chainabuse, which partners with law enforcement and alerts industry partners to warn users prior to signing fraudulent transactions. Chainabuse then offers free, instant support for victims of scams and financial crimes, where victims can get personalized advice on their case, including optional investigative support.
Events, Hackathons and More
Civic took to the stage at ETH Denver this year, coinciding with our launch of support for Ethereum and Polygon. Our CEO, Chris Hart, spoke about how identity is bigger than any single chain, and our Chief Product Officer, JP Bedoya, spoke about user experience and identity in Web3. We are thrilled to rejoin the Ethereum community and offer support for this creative and expanding ecosystem.
During the first quarter, we also supported fledgling dApps across blockchains with hackathon bounties. Civic offered bounties for the integration of our Civic library to the Sandstorm and H.E.R. DAO hackathons. We’re so proud to offer prizes to Sandstorm winners in the decentralized identity track: first place went to Cubik, a quadratic funding platform for pooling funds that are distributed to projects based on community engagement and impact. Cubik uses Civic Pass to prevent Sybil attacks and voting fairness.
Our runner up prize went to Texaglo, a no-code website deployment for artists. And finally, first place in the H.E.R. DAO hackathon went to Pollverse, a metaverse that facilitates better public policy for government and civic institutions. To ensure user authenticity, Pollverse uses Civic Pass to verify humanity prior to log-in and displays the users’ portable public profile with the Civic.me SDK. Pollverse will eventually use Civic Pass to verify location and qualify user feedback.
Finally, we’re pleased to support the Solana ecosystem and continued learning. Our VP of engineering, Dan Kelleher, led a Solana workshop for developers and we sponsored a mixer in Berlin.
A Look Ahead
We’ll round out the first half of 2023 by announcing more chains and new partners. We’re also looking forward to attending Consensus and ETH CC in Paris. In the meantime, we will continue to support builders across chains and look for more ways for identity and access management.