Civic Announces Integration With Solana Blockchain

Spurred by an Explosion of Use Cases and High ETH Fees, Civic Joins Growing Solana Ecosystem

Civic Brings Digital Identity to the Future of Blockchain, Prioritizing Low Fees, Speed and Scalability

SAN FRANCISCO (March 11, 2021) — Civic, a leading innovator in digital identity solutions, today announced a technology integration with Solana, a project implementing a new, high-performance, permissionless blockchain. The collaboration will allow for improved privacy, regulatory compliance and ease-of-use as digital identity takes center stage as the cornerstone of the new wave of consumer-first blockchain infrastructure.

“Early blockchains have been good testing grounds, but with high fees and slow transactions, many consumers and applications are simply priced out of the ecosystem,” said Vinny Lingham, co-founder and CEO of Civic. “Now, with Solana, we’re making identity foundational to the blockchain and broader ecosystem that’s ready for the future and built to scale for mainstream consumption.”

Currently, high ETH transaction fees are blocking mainstream adoption of DeFi. These high rates more than erase any returns for the average investor, making investment in the ecosystem unattractive and unsustainable. Solana’s low fees scale as the ecosystem grows, and with Civic’s identity-based key management, key recovery and practical experience, Civic will help make financial tools more accessible to mainstream consumers.

In addition to the identity elements Civic is bringing to the Solana ecosystem for any project to leverage, the company is also building a consumer friendly gateway to DeFi on Solana starting with a wallet experience that enhances the vision started with their mobile app on Ethereum. The wallet will offer intuitive design, identity-backed key management and a safe place to store tokens. Because of Solana’s technology, the wallet will be high-speed and have low transaction fees. The company plans to eventually merge the new wallet with its existing mobile Civic Wallet. Civic believes that identity will be a necessity for businesses in Solana’s ecosystem in order to comply with global regulations in the near future if DeFi is to truly scale for mainstream consumer adoption. These new products will offer more privacy and a more secure experience for DeFi products and other application layer technologies.

Civic uses Identity.com’s open-source identity verification ecosystem to power its identity products. Identity.com recently announced its own integration with Solana, focusing on refining decentralized identities and the next version of its marketplace. Together, the organizations are building consumer-first, privacy focused frameworks for better compliance and regulation, so that more safeguards may be brought in as the industry scales.

“Identity verification is a key component of the web2 stack, and I am thrilled to see companies like Civic building to support a decentralized web3 world.” said Anatoly Yakovenko, President of the Solana Foundation.

As leaders in the decentralized identity space, Civic is focused on a few real-world applications of its blockchain-powered technology. When a user signs up with Civic Wallet, they are authenticated as a real person by securely verifying their identifiable information and incorporating groundbreaking blockchain-based technology. Once they have a Civic Wallet, users are able to selectively share parts of their verified identity with third parties, for example, purchasing age-restricted products anonymously. The company also recently launched a flexible identity verification product that helps organizations verify identity quickly with minimal integration.

Solana is a fast, low-cost Layer-1 blockchain designed to scale with advancements in hardware technology. Currently, Solana can handle up to 50,000 tps with sub-second finality and transaction fees as low as $0.00001. By comparison, Ethereum supports a maximum of 15 transactions per second. Most importantly, Solana’s blazing speed and low fees scale as the ecosystem grows without sacrificing censorship resistance or security. Solana has already seen growing interest in the DeFi space with established DEXes and AMMs, such as Serum and Raydium, already processing billions of user transactions.

About Civic Technologies

As leaders in the decentralized identity space, Civic is focused on a few real-world applications of its blockchain-powered technology. The company offers flexible identity verification technology for businesses and is using digital identity as a gateway for decentralized finance on the Solana blockchain. Civic uses identity.com’s open-source, blockchain-based ecosystem to verify credentials. Civic was co-founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs Vinny Lingham and Jonathan Smith.

About Solana

Solana is a high-performance Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain focused on delivering scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security.

Until now, blockchains have been single-threaded computers, guaranteeing no two transactions conflict if executed in parallel. Solana unlocks concurrent GPU-parallelization for the first time, using Proof of History (PoH), a clock before consensus, delivering high speed, low latency, and inexpensive transactions, all at layer 1 without sharding.

Developed by a team of former Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, and Dropbox engineers, Solana is stewarded by The Solana Foundation and is advanced by a loyal community of decentralized developers around the world. To learn more, please visit https://solana.com/.