CIVIC Investment Analysis
The Civic Identity Platform is an identity management service that allows you to protect and authorize the use of your identity in real-time.
In other words, it is the ultimate single sign on based on your personable identity verifiable information such as social security, passports, and driver’s license can be digitalized and stored ready to use when you are requested to authorize your identity.
Civic wants to create a trustless service to have access to every day services like online banking.
Once you have created a Civic account, and your data is stored you can then begin to access the above-mentioned services like online banking.
Civic also provides additional services to help protect your identity such as credit report alerting, identity fraud coverage, and access to 24/7 fraud support.
HOW WILL CIVIC BE USED?
Banks, utility companies, local, state, and federal agencies, etc. will be able to verify the attributes of the identity of an individual or business on a blockchain and through the use of smart contracts, validators will be able to price their identity verifications and offer them to other participants.
Civic is planning on creating an “Ecosystem” for their identity verification service. The “Ecosystem” will consist of three components:
1) A variety of smart contracts
2) An indigenous utility token known as the Civic token or CVC
3) New software applications introduced by Civic and others, that allow participants to interact within the “Ecosystem”
The Ecosystem will incentivize participation by trusted identity verification providers known as “Validators.”
Civic (CVC) tokens will be used
BENEFITS OF TOKENS
Users receive CVCs for providing their data more securely and privately through the ecosystem.
Validators receive CVCs when other participants utilize their attestations to prove their identities.
All categories of participants can utilize CVCs for identity-related products and services
Civic tokens (CVC) are ERC-20 compliant tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
CIVIC ARCHITECTURE
Authenticate without the need for traditional physical IDs, knowledge based authentication, username/password, and two-factor hardware tokens. Here are some of the services and solutions we are launching with our Civic Business Customers but many more are under development.
INTRODUCING CIVIC’S Secure Identity PlatformSecure Private Sign-up & Login[1]
New account creation can be simplified by providing verified identity data with the Civic app. While this service may sound similar to Facebook Login, Civic’s Secure Private Sign-up (SPS) and Secure Private Login (SPL) offers both privacy of data transactions and greater trust in user identity. By utilizing SPS, you can rest assured that new accounts are created by the true owner of the identity data. Civic’s SPL enables you to allow your users to log in to your web and mobile apps without a username or password. SPL provides a better user experience and multi-factor authentication without weak passwords, password reset vulnerabilities and the hassle of legacy two-factor authentication.
Cryptocurrency
Secure new account creation using Civic verified identity for KYC. Multi-factor authentication for web and mobile apps.
E-Signature
Better user experience with more options to establish various levels of trust in the identity of a signer of a document
Social
Secure account creation that offers varying levels of privacy to your users, including anonymity or verified demographic attributes
Financial Services
Avoid new account fraud with verified identity data. Multi-factor authentication with simple user experience
E-Commerce
Reduce the impact of data breach by not storing user PII with credit card data. Avoid identity fraud with a Civic verified identity
Medical
Allow Civic Members to securely store and instantly share authenticated medical records from their device with the Civic App
HOW IT WORKS
Individual downloads the Civic App and completes an Identity Validation Process customized to the Civic Business Customer requirements. This process verifies Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to ensure ownership of the identity with enough data to establish the level of trust required by the Civic Business Customer. In other words, more PII may be collected to establish a high level of trust, e.g. scanning of passport, driver’s license and social security number, while only minimal PII, e.g. only email and mobile phone number, may be collected for new users when the Civic Business Customer only wants to verify the user is real and unique.
After validation, the user is now considered a Civic Member with authenticated identity data secured in the Civic App on the user’s device, not stored by Civic. The Civic Member may share this previously authenticated identity data with Civic Business Customers, businesses that enter into a partnership with Civic. Civic Business Customers leverage our blockchain technology for real-time authentication of Civic Member identity data.
Identity Validation & Monetization
Civic Identity Validation
Once identity data is provided by a user, Civic uses multiple identity validation service providers to authenticate submitted data against phone, credit, social media, and other public records. By combining many sources with fraud detection algorithms, manual auditing, and our proprietary internal decision engine, Civic maintains a high pass rate for legitimate users while mitigating the risks of fraudulent behavior.
Third Party Identity Validation
A Civic Business Customer may decide to accept identity data previously validated by a Civic Identity Partner rather than Civic. For example, an e-commerce provider may trust the identity validation process of a financial institution, therefore accepting this data for their identity requirements. Another example is a government entity using the Civic platform to issue digital identity data directly to the Civic app, such as a passport or driver license.
Monetize Reusable KYC
When someone is validated as a Civic Member, their identity can be reused at other Civic Business Customers, replacing some or all legacy identity validation. This can provide Civic Identity Partners opportunities to monetize verified identity data of their users. If you issue authenticated identity data on the blockchain with the Civic architecture, the Civic Member can share that data with a Civic Business Customer for real-time authentication of identity. The Civic Business Customer pays a small fee that is shared with the Civic Identity Partner to avoid paying a larger fee to do their own authentication.
ADVANTAGES
1) Experienced management and advisors
2) Clear plan and detailed whitepaper
3) Great potential and real-life application of the project
4) Healthy partner network (network effects)[1], this is their potentially greatest advantage
DISADVANTAGES
1) Not first to market, there exists competition such as uPort (https://www.uport.me/) and similar business models such as Radium, Factom, and Digusign.
2) Small development team at the moment
3) No alpha version
ROAD MAP
The Civic team has published a page detailing their road map for 2017 which can be found at the following link: https://tokensale.civic.com/
[1] https://www.civic.com/partners
TEAM
Vinny Lingham, CEO
Vinny is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded the digital gift card platform, Gyft, which was acquired by First Data Corporation in 2014. After over a decade of experience in e-commerce, he realized that no-one had a universal solution to tackle identity fraud for consumers.
Jonathan Smith, CTO
Jonathan has more than 15 years of experience in banking and technology advisory. After a successful career in some of the most complex and security sensitive environments, Jonathan brings his talent for technology leadership, innovation and delivery to the world of digital identity.
Technical Advisors
Matt Roszak, Co-founder and chairman of Bloq
Jeff Garzik, Co-founder and CEO of Bloq
Juan Benet, CEO at Protocol Labs, Inc.
Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar, CEO & Co-founder at RSK Labs
Anthony Di Iorio, CEO & Founder at Jaxx and Decentral, Founder at Ethereum
Jeffrey Paul, Hacker, Researcher, Speaker, Entrepreneur, EEQJ, Inc.
CHALLENGES
There are two major challenges one immediate and another medium/long term:
1. Mass user adoption
2. Competition
Mass User Adoption
Civic has a talented team and a deep partner network which I foresee will be the key to their success. I cite this as a potential challenge but I feel that Civic is capable to handle this. The two keys to any successful business endeavor: 1. Be great at what you do and 2. Be great at telling and selling others on what you do.
Competition
uPort and Factom, Radium, Digusign are among a few competitors trying to dominate this space. Whether Civic will emerge as the leader is to be seen. And it really all depends on what service can garnish mainstream attention and real-world use.
1. General Stats
a. Created: 2015
b. Headquarters Location
i. Palo Alto, California
c. Mission:
i. Decentralized identity management service that allows you to protect and authorize the use of your identity in real-time.
ii. Coins Supply
1. 1,000,000,000 CVC
iii. Circulating Supply
iv. 340,000,000 CVC
d. Market share price as of July 28, 2017
i. $0.157057
0.00005708 BTC
0.00078362 ETH
ii. Market cap as of July 28, 2017
1. $53,399,380
19,406 BTC
266,430 ETH
2. Ranked 56
2. Who is the customer base?
a. Banks, Financial Institutions, State, Local and Federal Governments
3. Strategy to Gain Adoption
a. Leverage large partner network to gain mass user adoption
b.
TOKEN DISTRIBUTION
1 Billion Tokens Issued
- Company Tokens
- Partner Tokens
- Crowd Sale Tokens
- Cover tokensale costs
Maximum cap on crowdsale: $33 million
Total token supply: 1 billion (1,000,000,000) CVC, of which:
- 33% sold in the tokensale
- 33% retained by Civic
- 33% allocated for distribution to incentivize participation in the ecosystem
- 1% to cover tokensale costs
Ethereum ERC20 token
Purchase methods accepted: BTC and ETH
TREND ANALYSIS
This statistic shows identity theft complaints filed with the FTC in the U.S., by type of crime. In 2016, about 32.7 percent of complaints filed were due to credit card fraud.
Identity theft complaints in the U.S. in 2016, by nature of crime
This statistic shows the number of identity theft complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission, by state during 2016. In 2016, the state with the most identity theft complaints was California where 54,744 cases were reported.
Identity theft complaints lodged with the F.T.C. in the U.S., by state in 2016
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Civic has a seasoned team, and a good product offering. There is definitely a need for the problem of “let’s just make it easier to log into to websites without a username and password because they get stolen all the time and other accounts get hacked. Let’s make the I.D. infrastructure for the internet un-hackable, X scale. If someone can steal your phone and hack your phone, fine. But they can’t steal 7 billion phones and hack them all at the same time.”
According to Vinny Lingham, in an interview he did with CoinFund, “We are solving the problem of usernames and passwords and removing the passwords entry with device space. And we are solving the problem of two-factor authentication. So sites that have usernames and passwords, just add Civic as an additional, just take away SMS and use Civic to activate an account. With Civic authenticating.”
Civic has a big road ahead to tackle and to gain user adoption. The question comes down to execution, which unfortunately is not always guaranteed even with a good team behind the project.
Time will tell as to how well Civic can create a market presence and dominate the space of identity verification and management.
