This week, digital identity solution provider Civic announced a new technology integration with Solana, a project developing and implementing a high-performance, permissionless blockchain. The collaboration was spurred by an explosion of blockchain use cases and high ETH fees in the crypto economy and aims to provide a low-cost, scalable solution with improved privacy, regulatory compliance and ease-of-use as digital identity becomes increasingly involved in consumer-first blockchain infrastructures.

Decentralized Finance for the Future

Unlike traditional financial institutions, the perks of decentralized finance (DeFi) lie in its return of control to individual users over one’s assets, high security, low-cost transactions, fully permissionless access for people anywhere in the world and lack of a single source of failure. However, high ETH transaction fees are currently blocking the widespread adoption of DeFi. These high rates erase most returns for the average investor, making investment in the ecosystem unattractive and unsustainable. 

“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.”

To combat this barrier to entry, Civic is leveraging Solana, which offers 400ms block times, sub-second finality, no mempool and the ability to handle 50,000 transactions per second, therefore providing a high-speed and efficient blockchain structure to build on. On top of this, Solana’s low transaction fees, which start as low as $0.00001, scale as the ecosystem grows without sacrificing censorship resistance or security and does not require developers to integrate with multiple shards or layer 2 solutions, therefore making mainstream adoption of the new Civic integration attainable.

On top of this, Civic is bringing a number of identity elements to the Solana ecosystem in order to build a consumer-friendly mobile wallet app that serves as a gateway to DeFi. Built on Ethereum, the mobile wallet will offer intuitive design, identity-backed key management, as well as a safe place to store tokens. Other features will include the ability to store SPL tokens including USDC and CVC, trade tokens, and buy SOL. This new Solana-powered wallet will eventually merge with Civic’s existing mobile wallet, the Civic Wallet. 

Civic believes that identity management and verification 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.

“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.

Through this new collaboration between Solana and Civic, the fintech industry will take a step toward making financial tools more secure and more accessible to mainstream consumers.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Serena He is a Tech Innovation Fellow from the University of Southern California who is interested in AI and the intersection of design and technology. She enjoys covering news across the digital identity and tech space.

Contact Serena He at serena@identityreview.com.

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