An upfront disclosure – Social Leverage (our fund) is the first check/angel investor in Civic.com. We outlined the thesis and our investment back in January 2016.

Ok onward to the exciting and risky bleeding edge…

Today I am diving into our portfolio company Civic.com. Their vision is to create a truly decentralized identity ecosystem. To carry out that vision they are launching a utility token known as the Civic Token (CVC) and have just announced a $33 million token offering. Anyone can sign up and learn more and invest as little as $10 (ten) and participate. Here is what the offering looks like:

What is Civic?

Civic’s model allows for on-demand, secure and lower cost access to identity verification via the blockchain. Background and personal information verification checks may no longer need to be undertaken from the ground up every time a new institution or application requires one. Civic already has a working identity verification product that is available worldwide. Civic has won Best New Startup award at the K(NO)W Identity Conference 2017.

Civic’s new ecosystem will reduce the overall cost of KYC (know your customer), remove inefficiencies, enhance security and privacy, greatly improve user experience and disrupt the current identity verification supply chain.

Civic has an amazing technical team with a live product and huge vision. The company is NOT just a ‘whitepaper’ (though they have one).

The founder is Vinny Lingham who I have known for many years. I have referenced Vinny and Civic many times on the blog. Vinny has been involved in the bleeding edge of the Bitcoin community and one of the main reasons I remained bullish as Bitcoins plunged back to $200 back in 2015. He writes about all this here. Vinny previously founded Gyft.com which was acquired by First Data Corporation.

Why Civic?

As I mentioned to start this post, we are already investors.

I am speculating further with Vinny and Civic and am personally participating in the ICO token sale because I believe in the product and market opportunity and the token sale is a bold new way to grow a network. Furthermore, Vinny has his reputation on the line to deliver now that I have blogged about it!

There will be many ICO/token scams in this new frontier. The promises made of untold riches are already in motion. This is very much a new frontier in financing meets product meets marketing.