Following the announcement of our pre-registration list for the Civic Wallet, we’ve been building an impressive 100,000-person strong waitlist. Our vision of building a safer, more convenient digital wallet with an emphasis on protecting users’ identity and money is strongly resonating with our core community. Not only have our users indicated their interest by signing up for the Wallet, they’ve also told us through a user survey we recently conducted that they would like to leverage better tools with more secure identity features to transact with and grow their crypto.

A More Secure Wallet

We securely verify users of the Civic Wallet without sharing unnecessary Personally Identifiable Information (PII) between multiple parties. This revolutionary model is built on the Identity.com open-source ecosystem, which gives users more control over their personal information by limiting the use of their data. Once they have a Civic Wallet, users will also be able to selectively share parts of their verified identity with third parties, for example, to purchase age-restricted products anonymously.

Civic Wallet is paving the way for the next generation of digital wallets, where both your identity information and money, whether crypto or traditional currency, live on mobile devices. With the easy-to-use Civic Wallet, users will be able to store and transact with crypto easily, privately, and securely. This identity secured non-custodial wallet provides an easy on-ramp for both the crypto savvy and fiat audiences alike and provides safety and simplicity in a way that the industry has not known before. By building the Civic Wallet and connecting users with a safer gateway to accessing their money, Civic is bringing the Identity.com ecosystem to life and building out the vision of our token sale.

As a whole, the cryptocurrency space will benefit from the identity ecosystem, which is foundational to proper functionality. Without identity verification, entities transacting with crypto may not be able to prevent money laundering and may not be able to comply with regulations, which the industry needs in order to reach broader success. Indeed, intergovernmental organizations are already providing frameworks for regulation, such as a set of guidelines recently issued by the Financial Action Task Force. Further, the Civic Wallet’s core identity features allow for the support of multiple use cases like proof of age, access management, and better account security.

Buzz Around Civic Wallet and our Partners

We’ve been building Civic Wallet in partnership with trusted names within the crypto community. Together with our partner BitGo, the leader in digital asset financial services, we’ve joined forces to launch the first consumer digital wallet built on their multisig technology, so that if a user loses their digital wallet’s private key, their crypto will still be recoverable. This is a big step forward from recent years when losing a private key meant that crypto would not be recoverable. Adding to the product’s consumer appeal will be its usability and the ease of its design. Mainstream adoption that people feel confident, secure and in control when transacting with crypto, so incorporating multisig technology and an elegant interface is key to Wallet’s success.

Following our Civic Wallet pre-registration and BitGo partnership announcement, we received standalone press coverage from CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph, Mobile Payments Today, and Cheddar, reprinted in Yahoo! Finance and Investing.com among others. CoinDesk highlighted several features of the digital wallet including its ability to maintain anonymity while offering a back-up solution, reinforcing the wallet’s positioning as an easier way to protect and secure a user’s money and identity.

We also announced our first validator to enable AI-powered technology to verify identities of people signing up for Civic Wallet. With technology that assesses whether identification is either genuine or fraudulent and comparing it to facial biometrics, Civic is able to quickly authenticate a user. Our announcement was covered in FinExtra, Electronics Payments International, and Business Telegraph.

The Civic Wallet is one component of a larger vision to give people a digital identity they can own and control. This ecosystem touches many industries as further coverage from Cointelegraph, Decrypt.com and Cheddar illustrate. We also connected with our audience through longer form mediums, like podcasts, for State of Identity and Blockworks.

Other Highlights

This fall, we announced a partnership with CardConnect, a First Data company, to launch the next-generation identity and payment network for merchants, which streamlines checkouts and reduces risk, improving the overall customer experience.

We were also proud to announce that Identity.com is operating independently as a 501(c)(4), a nonprofit organization to promote social welfare. At Civic, we’ve always been of the mindset that such a powerful ecosystem should not be owned by any one entity because its mission is to bring benefit to the greater good. Identity.com continues to operate with the goal of helping decentralize the world’s personal information and providing a marketplace where people can transact, making it seamless and secure for people to get control of their personal information.

A DeFi Marketplace Takes Shape

We’re hard at work readying the launch of the Civic Wallet to pre-registrants this year and are continuing to make attestations on the Identity.com blockchain. As we take a look beyond 2019 into the new year, we are seeing a market need within the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space. With a non-custodial wallet that secures both a user’s money and identity, we’re well-positioned to act as a gateway for the next generation of financial accounts that serve a broad audience, including people who are currently unbanked. As we move forward into 2020, we expect to build upon our position within the DeFi community.