Civic's identity management solution expands into DeFi

0:02i'm ashton addison from investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have chris hart the ceo of civic chris welcome to the show thank you so much for taking the time to come on and it's great to have a civic back thanks ashton great to be here i know we were on last year so more good stuff to talk about happy to join

0:23so much stuff has happened in the cryptocurrency industry since last year feels like 10 years yeah i would love to kick off our conversation but just hearing a little bit about your background chris and how you got involved in blockchain and in civic yeah absolutely so my background actually started in tech i used to build data centers for

0:43high frequency options trading firms so going way back to the day trader days in the first kind of stock boom when everybody was going to sit at home and you know make money and not have to go to work and all of that sort of in the early 2000s so that's kind of like my initial entry point i was the kind of guy who would build my own computers and server rooms

1:05and all that stuff later on you know went into finance became a controller ended up as a cfo for a couple silicon valley companies but there was something always in the back of my mind that said there's got to be a better way to handle technology to handle data transfer and in particular handle money transfers around the globe so i got introduced to vinnie to answer your

1:29question about how into crypto once you speak to vinnie obviously he's been in crypto for a long time has a lot of background it's sort of like you know the neo moment on which pill are you gonna take and you know for me it was 2017 when i said you know this technology really has legs it is going to revolutionize the way money is handled but i think almost even more

1:54importantly it's going to revolutionize the way data gets handled with distributed ledger technology which is just so powerful and so many applications which i really believe we're just starting to tap into the potential of what that really means so i kind of bring a technology a little bit of a finance background into it and i joined civic in 2017 right so i've been

2:17You know drinking from the fire hose in the crypto world for the last several years and really focusing on distributed identity and supporting projects who are looking to bring identity to crypto so that's been our focus that's great kristin yeah it's always funny when you're a controller and you're in the traditional finance industry and you're like there's all

2:42these inefficiencies like there's got to be some solutions right and then all of a sudden the blockchain pill comes in and you're like do i take it and then you just get you know encompassed with like blockchain 24 7. and there's just so much stuff that's going on in the industry and i know civic is working on a lot of solutions as well that i think are going

3:03to make a huge impact in transactions all around the world and i would love for you to just give an explanation and an overview of what are those main solutions that civic is focused on right now yeah so we're we're focused in a couple of different areas obviously we've been working on identity kind of since our inception and you know so far those identity use

3:24cases have played out in a variety of different ways i'll give you a couple of examples you know one is access management we work with johnson controls which is part of tyco it's a big multinational they use the civic identity for access management into office buildings so you can imagine you know every time you go into an office building you go line up

3:46at that desk and show your identity document and we thought to ourselves and jci agreed wouldn't it be better if you could just bring your portable identity with you that has a blockchain entry that says you are who you say you are tied to the mobile app tied to identity documents 3d verification face mapping all of the checks having been done really smooth set experience so access

4:12management is kind of one area where we've seen a lot of interest another one is more sort of traditional kyc and login so we work with a lot of projects who need to verify who their customers are and they want that identity importantly i think to be easy to use and reusable and portable even between applications so we think there's a lot of power in the network

4:37effect of being able to have your identity and bring it with you wherever you go and this is kind of a self-sovereign model in so far as you should be able to take your identity bring it with you and use it in a variety of different use cases whether that's access management or logging into a website or to prove who you know you are in a variety of context but i'll

5:00give you one more example another really interesting area that we've been working on is kind of zero knowledge proof of some fact about your identity and one good example we're doing a partnership with is called blackfire innovation it's right on outside of las vegas in partnership with unlv and caesars entertainment to sort of demonstrate what it could look like to share a fact

5:27about you but without sharing the underlying data which we think is really powerful and the way that we're demoing this is in a vending machine where we say you can walk up you can prove that you're of age to receive a beer you scan you know the screen you get the beer distributed and so we're always trying to think about where places that identity should play a part could play a part to

5:51enable adoption of new technologies and that's really where we're we're focusing and then play that forward obviously you know the burgeoning d5 space and the regulatory oversight that's coming online we think creates tremendous opportunity to really advance identity in a digital way and accelerate adoption definitely all great use cases chris and

6:17i really like that beer vending machine idea i was i was talking up with some other companies about the zero knowledge proofs and from what i understand you know you can prove that you're 21 to get the beer but you don't actually reveal your age as opposed to actually giving your id with your name and your address and your and your birthday and what year it's just like i'm over 21

6:38but i can't tell you exactly how old i am all you have to know is that it's over right right and i think importantly ashton a lot of companies don't want that data right i mean this creates risk for them to ingest all of this data now they have security risk storage risk they have pii with the advent of things like gdpr and ccpa in california these compliance

7:02regimes it's really important that you store data in a very secure way so if your use case doesn't absolutely call for you to take and store personal information of your customers you should not do that and a lot of companies you know that appeals to them they say we don't want to take the data we would rather just know give us a thumbs up and we'll go ahead and move forward with a

7:24transaction otherwise we don't want to know right that's great and you mentioned there at the end about also getting involved in the d5 space i'm sure identity plays a big role in finance and you know managing money and moving it around and in the d5 space right now it's sort of 50 50 on you know some of the decentralized protocols you don't really

7:45need to use any identity and there's some anonymity and then there's regulators coming in on the other side saying like you know you need to be using identity for the centralized exchanges and it's sort of moving into defy so can you talk about how civics playing a role in defy and identity and is it necessary yeah yeah i mean it's really interesting and

8:06i in a lot of ways i think this mirrors innovation curves that you see on a regular basis maybe it's on a 50-year cycle or a hundred year cycle if you look at the adoption and the advent of stock exchanges generally 100 years ago you know it's pretty much the wild west you know anybody could come in they could stand up in exchange they could list a security and

8:29that changed over time for really good reasons you know there was a lot of bad actors in the space there was a lot of need to identify who people were to drum bad bad actors out but i think you know we centralize and control i think sometimes at the risk of stifling innovation so there's a very careful balance that needs to be maintained because i think defy

8:54is unbelievably innovative it has created tremendous opportunity and access to financial products for a whole population of people for whom those things were simply not available or you know in their countries were things that were precluded or things they couldn't participate in so the way civic views this is there is a identity that is the core of

9:20who you are which belongs to you and really i think we're adherence to a lot of the ideals of the self-sovereign identity movement in that you should be able to attest to your own unis for lack of a better term but we also recognize that in order to participate in some of these things like financial structures or to prove ownership of it could be nfts it could

9:46be the house that you bought and making sure the title is really yours it could be a lot of different things but in order to be able to prove that there is actually a need to have some authoritative documentation or authoritative government-issued id or something that you can check so i think what we're seeing right now is kind of the tip of the sphere as you

10:09said was the centralized exchanges and the regulatory bodies that came in and said hey we're going to need to understand for these large movements of money who the counterparties are on either side so the way civic thinks about this is how do we take this identity need maintain a lot of the self-sovereign and distributed identity principles and ideals

10:36and some of the zero-knowledge stuff that we were talking about before which is do you need to you know send all of the information it kind of reminds me of you know when you go to a doctor's office and they hand you a form and they're asking you for all this information right it's like social security number and where do you live in your medical history and all this stuff the reality

10:55is they probably don't need 75 of them but there is a very important core of information they do need they need to know what medications you're taking you know you could have adverse effects from interactions of drugs or whatever i kind of think of it that way there's a piece that's needed and i think defy sort of needs to think about generally how do we

11:19ride that line we don't want to stifle innovation you know lending pools ammons are really powerful taking out the middlemen between transactions dexes are unbelievably transformative in a lot of ways so we need to maintain that but also protect privacy and not stifle the innovation definitely i completely agree chris and you're right you know about the doctor's

11:46office i know a lot of friends that they get these long forms and they're just like what's the minimum that i can fill out that will suffice you know with this what from what information you need right and i think in d5 it's sort of the same where you know if you're doing a micro transaction and if you're in a developing nation and trying to get a

12:04micro loan for 10 or 100 and work your way up building like a decentralized credit score versus going on d5 and moving 50 000 there might be a different level of identity that's needed there where you know you might not be able to need to give information if you're just having very small amounts so i think that is going to become more granular

12:27as in the d5 space as well and it won't be just a blanket kyc for every dollar moved yeah i think that's right and you know there are different approaches you know i think that can be taken and there's value in a couple of different ones for example you can look at a list of wallet addresses and you can say here are known bad wallet addresses and we're

12:50going to maintain a white list at a black list and there are companies doing that and that's sort of the external view looking in it's like how do we see what's going on from an external lens and monitor and make sure that we understand velocity and strange transactions and bad wallets and all that stuff we're kind of taking the inverse approach which is what if we took it from the

13:12inside and then allowed people to share elements of identity and tied that back to something meaningful like a wallet or a deed to a house or an nft and attribute ownership to that in a really meaningful way that's verifiable unchained distributed and at the discretion of the user that shares the very bare minimum of the data required so that's

13:37kind of the approach that we're taking and there's validity in both i think both are needed definitely i agree and last time i spoke with the civic team you know the wallet that holds your identity was in the private beta i'd love to hear an update on you know where the team is at right now with the product and where you're heading for the end of this

13:57year yeah so you know with the wallet is now out and publicly available we've had i think over 120 000 downloads people are using it in a variety of contexts whether that's login or vending machines or access a whole bunch of different kyc use cases so we're pretty excited about that as we've talked about you know we're we're really looking at

14:25this defy space we think there's something very very interesting there and we think there's a real need and civics technology we feel is really well suited to serve that use case and that business area and so you know the team basically is you know distributed around the world we pretty much are focused on polishing identity adopting things like

14:52did standards making sure that identity can be available cross chain which is really important we think because the proliferation of kind of you know l2 chains and applications that need to be moving from you know ethereum over to other chains or you know the burgeoning solana ecosystem which is really coming up very very very strongly and quickly

15:19we want to be in a place where we can serve all those projects and we think identity is kind of like a universal lego that you should be able to take from chain to chain and it should just follow you wherever you go it should be able to tie you to your wallet your identity and your you know passport or driver's license and sort of everything in between so we've been

15:41really really focused on those use cases and working kind of hand in glove with a whole bunch of really interesting projects very cool and yeah definitely needed on the interoperability as d5 continues to grow out and these other blockchain protocols are going to start interacting more closely with the ethereum ecosystem you really do need that identity that

16:02can spread across all of the ecosystems and just be like a universal plug and play yep yep i mean what we're what we're finding too is you know different projects are gravitating to different chains as needed for their particular use case in the case of really high volume high frequency type transaction use cases we're seeing movements to i think solana mostly

16:28but also you know obviously algorand and polka dot and there's a whole bunch of other you know really good changes in projects out there that we think are are very interesting it but you know you said it on the ethereum chain there's a ton of volume there's you know the nft marketplace is going nuts and there's a real need to be able to

16:50tie identity to that so we see a lot of opportunity to actually augment what projects are already doing and you know this is one of those things that should sort of be like a utility when you're out there innovating your project and you're thinking about how we want to build something and what you want to bring to market being able to grab an identity piece and just layer that in

17:13without even thinking twice about it i think makes life a lot easier and we think it's going to accelerate innovation and interoperability as well i agree and it's it's interesting to note that you know ethereum really didn't ha doesn't have anything built into the layer one identity they need a solution to sort of build on top there and it sounds like civic

17:36Is already making great strides with the wallet and the 120 000 users so congratulations on the success so far chris for the viewers that are looking to learn more about civic the wallet the civic coin and what your team is working on moving forward what's the best place for them to get involved and find out more yeah i would encourage everybody to go

17:59to civic.com our blog is updated regularly with news but also join us on our discord server we have a lot of interesting announcements and discussions on there and we love to engage with the community and answer questions so those are probably the two best places sounds great chris i'll leave those links in the description box below as well all the best with civic moving

18:23forward and let's follow up in the near future all right thanks ashton thanks for having me