WalletConnect <> Civic: Layering Permissioned Access into the Wallet Connection Experience

Two weeks ago, we joined our friends at Civic, who were busy hacking away at the Solana Hacker House taking place in Lisbon.

A web3 identity management tool provider, Civic provides Civic Passes, which are essentially verified credentials for the Solana ecosystem that allow access to permissioned environments created by dapps. For example, an NFT project might want to use Civic Passes as a permissioning tool to allow only one NFT per wallet, thus ensuring that minters are not bots. Not only does this help build a diverse and highly-engaged community, but it also discourages minters from immediately flipping their NFTs on secondary markets. Once that’s done, users can use Civic.me, its recently-launched dashboard, to privately manage their Civic Passes as part of their dynamic web3 profile.

For this edition of Solana Hacker House, the Civic team integrated WalletConnect’s Web3Modal to enable connection with mobile wallets, and even set up a limited edition NFT mint protected by a Civic Pass to showcase how it would work.

The demo: Using Web3Modal and Civic Pass together to permission access

First, you need to connect your wallet with the app — in this case, the NFT mint page. Web3Modal, WalletConnect’s wallet connection interface, pops up; once you scan the QR code, an end-to-end encrypted connection is established, essentially signing you into the NFT mint page. However, you can’t immediately access the mint. You have to first pass the liveness verification to obtain the Civic Pass.

Kevin from Civic and Vanes from WalletConnect also presented the demo at Solana Breakpoint.

In this demo, the liveness verification method is a video selfie. Once that goes through, it activates the Civic Pass — meaning the mint can now take place. It’s not possible to bypass this crucial Civic Pass step because it’s an on-chain step that must be completed in order to unlock access to the mint. In this case, users were able to mint a special Civic x WalletConnect NFT!

A very special Civic x WalletConnect NFT! Can you spot our logos?

This kind of on-chain permissioning helps build trust within communities of verified users, and it’s an easy add-on to the wallet connection experience. If you’re interested in finding out more about Civic, check out their website and Twitter.

To keep up with our announcements, join our Discord and follow us on Twitter. If you are a wallet or an app that is interested in integrating WalletConnect, head over to our website and explore our documentation.