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Civic is a crypto company which is run by visible Bitcoin enthusiast Vinny Langham. It was launched to a sizeable ICO, but it’s vision of tokenizing identity, and marrying security with cryptotokens is drawing some serious criticism- insult to injury- as the token is trading at half its ICO price.
Writing for The Block, Aljun Balaji makes the claim that Civic is a kind of cautionary tale against ‘many of the flawed token-based approaches,’ which Civic exemplified, specifically the idea that a company should ‘masquerade’ or opt to be traded like a token, even if it isn’t one. Civic’s ICO business model is familiar, but it’s still hard to make a case that a company which is using blockchain to secure identity should be tokenized. The association between crypto and blockchain notwithstanding, Civic wasn’t a crypto company, and it hasn’t served it well to be traded as one.
Balaji writes,
‘Even if their platform is useful, the question every ICO team should be asking is still outstanding: why use a proprietary token for payment when a fiat-backed token (more stable), bitcoins (decentralized money token), or just dollars (simple) suffice?’
In fact, Civic’s ICO token itself has since lost 96% of its peak value, and this huge hit to the overall value of the company makes the once-so-hip ICO model a lot more suspect. Iaian Fraser, a former developer at Civic, has in fact cosigned Balaji’s points, adding that Civic sought a ‘flurry’ of partnerships (all from the same ‘ICO shop’) in order to bolster what was presumably a somewhat vacuous coin’s utility.
@lawmaster Speaking of faux partnerships, notice the recent flurry of partnerships between Civic, Brave and Rivetz as they desperately seek "utility" - all alumni of the same ICO shop. pic.twitter.com/QA0Ivv9F2X
— Iain Fraser (@IainFra) December 21, 2018
The ICO model is also taking a serious hit with regulators, especially in the US with the SEC. While ICOs had their moment in the sun, they may be going by the wayside, or at least kept for the development of actual tokens, rather than tokenizing services and non-financial software.
Read more: US SEC loses court case against crypto ICO