Vinny Lingham

He studied at the University of Cape Town but did not finish it due to turbulent financial times. As it always looks good to have a reason not to do a thing I think quitting university is not an indicator of an unsuccessful person. In fact, many absolutely great persons didn’t finish university and they are doing just great! We see a similar path in Vinny Lingham’s life.

In 2007 he founded Yola which received over $25 million in funding from an investment fund.

He’s also the founder of a South African-based high-tech startup hub.

He founded an investment fund which did great early stage investments.

He was selected as a young global leader in 2009 by the world economic forum.

In 2012 he started Gyft and two years later it was aquired for more than $54 million.

In 2015 he started Civic…

Vinny seems to be switching his focus over the years which could be seen as a bad sign. However, understanding the potential of blockchain technology just makes it more clear why he started in this space. With Civic he is tackling a huge problem — Identity management.

Why Civic doesn’t move(yet)

Lots of projects in the space release news and announcements to cause short-term price pumps (and dumps). This behavior might be good for short-term speculators but not for long-term investors — it’s completely irrelevant in long-term view. In the time project A is thinking about causing the next pump, project B is actually building something. Over the time the compound effect comes into play and project B has a significant advantage in the future. This is also a reason why Civic is lead by a great leader. Read it by yourselves:

Civic currently employs about 40–50 employees and does not push every single thing they do immediately to their Github page. This is a good thing! By doing this, the competition does not see what Civic is doing currently but at the same time, Civic can see what others are doing(Not that it needed to).

Selfkey’s recent move

Some investors might be concerned about short-term events like the recent Selfkey price movement which was caused by a Binance listing. Sure, everyone would have wanted to hold Selfkey before this happened but in the end we are always smarter.

Also it’s a question of simple supply and demand. Selfkey has a total supply of 5,999,999,954 KEY while Civic has 1,000,000,000 CVC. Let’s make a little thought experiment to get the idea a little more clear.

Think of two parallel worlds in which each has one ID solution. Civic in the first world and Selfkey in the other world. And let’s say the market circumstances for both projects are absolutely identical in their own worlds.

NEWSFLASH: “Civic / Selfkey is getting added to Facebook!”

Guess which project will move higher? Civic, of course. There are fewer CVC’s to be sold in the one world than KEY to be sold in the other world. Why is Gold so much more valuable than a stone? Scarcity.

Final words

Of course this was a very abstract thought experiment but you get the idea. Adding to this, the whole space is still quite young and there is room for multiple solutions over the next years until the dominant solution will become more obvious. Just like Google, Yahoo and Bing started out having similar potential from a growth perspective since the search engine market just wasn’t tackled yet.

Lastly, if you want to feel even better about this project, checkout Speculative thoughts on Civic.