Civic to Spend $43 Million In Tokens In Aggressive User Expansion

According to Civic founder Vinny Lingham, while the technology is all in place for the system to work, it's this network of users that the company is still struggling to achieve.

In an effort to spur this adoption, Civic announced Wednesday that it will be paying for all identity checks for users and business partners from now until the end of the year.

All told, Civic is allocating 333 million of its total 1 billion supply of CVC tokens, a third of which it sold for $33 million in an initial coin offering in June 2017.

The tokens will be transferred to Civic to pay for the cost of the identity checks, serving to bootstrap growth and stress-test the protocol.

For Civic, every new user that's had his or her identity verified on the platform makes it a little more attractive for the next company looking for an identity solution.

Civic - being the only entity, currently, that provides the know-your-customer verification within the system - will be paying itself in CVC tokens for the service.

Civic has built up a lot of partners, companies and entrepreneurs that need to verify a user's identity, the most well-known of which is Annheiser-Busch.

Once Civic knows that its system is working with high volume, they will open up the platform to other verifiers.

How many identity verifications can $43 million pay for? The general average cost for identity verification is $2, Lingham said, but there's a wide spread. "We're offering this for all our services, including the accredited investor test, which is like $60," Lingham said.

If in theory, the company ran out of all 333 million tokens before New Year's Day, the promotion would stop early.