Civic Partners With Snowcrash for NFTs by Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group

Civic’s identity verification technology will be leveraged by Snowcrash to prevent bots from participating in the NFT drops of illustrious musicians and artists.

SAN FRANCISCO and LOS ANGELES (March 29, 2022) — Today, Civic, a leader in digital identity solutions for Web3, and Snowcrash, a premier NFT trading platform, announced a strategic partnership to create permissioned access to the Snowcrash platform. Through this partnership, Snowcrash users will be checked for real person liveness and bots will be prevented from participating in the NFT drops of acclaimed musicians, artists, and other creators. Snowcrash recently launched its NFT trading platform with partners Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group with the aim of providing NFT content for cultural icons, including Bob Dylan and Miles Davis.

Bots have flooded NFT mints on the Solana blockchain since the summer of 2021, when the NFT ecosystem proliferated on the chain. The bots have a simple but destructive agenda: to scoop up inventory and flip the NFTs on secondary markets, a practice that is profitable for fraudsters but harmful for nascent NFT artists and communities. Since the recent introduction of the company’s Civic Pass product into the ecosystem, Civic has protected more than 200 mints, helped nearly 100,000 buyers successfully mint NFTs, and blocked a staggering 900,000+ bots from attempting purchases. Snowcrash will leverage Civic Pass, an on-chain solution that both restricts access from bots and protects user privacy at the same time. This will protect the NFT content of the storied musicians and artists of Snowcrash.

Jesse Dylan, Founder of Snowcrash, shared, “We are incredibly pleased to partner with Civic to protect our fans, artists, and communities. Through a practice similar to ticket scalping, botting has plagued NFT mints. Civic elegantly resolves this issue for us by identifying human participants and prohibiting bot participation, giving our NFT partners and IP holders like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group peace of mind.”

Chris Hart, CEO of Civic, said, “We’re delighted to partner with Snowcrash, a company that shares our core belief that opportunities to participate in Web3 should be accessible to everyone. We’re so excited for high-caliber companies like Snowcrash to up-level the NFT ecosystem and help more people gain access to this cultural moment in time.”

Walter De Brouwer, Founder of Snowcrash added, “Partnering with projects like Civic that prioritize the user experience is extremely important as we continue to establish Snowcrash as the premier marketplace for world-class IP holders to launch their treasured properties into the world of NFTs.”

The Civic and Snowcrash partnership offers top-tier brands access to a growing market for their digital collectibles on the Solana blockchain, while helping to define Web3 identity standards in the process.  

About Civic

Civic is a leading provider of identity management tools for web3, empowering people to easily and privately manage their identities across chains with an on-chain representation of their reusable identity. The company’s flagship product, Civic Pass, is an integrated permissioning tool that helps business customers enable secure access to their on-chain assets. Users may also manage their Web3 identity, presence and reputation with a dashboard. Civic aims to be the most trusted on-chain Web3 identity tool in the world, used by billions every day. Civic was co-founded in 2015 by Vinny Lingham and Jonathan Smith.

About Snowcrash

Snowcrash works with intellectual property holders, brands, artists, generative art scientists, AR-XR-VR artists, interactive world builders, games world architects to create collections of master editions, limited editions, streaming rights, and digital goods over a broad category of digital assets in visual art, music, movies, sports, games, architecture, and collectibles.