Blockchain Innovation for KYC

Shark Tank South Africa star and entrepreneur Vinny Lingham founded his own startup called Civic in 2016, and this company is now launching a really innovative product to demonstrate how Blockchain technology can be harnessed for the KYC process. KYC, or, Know Your Customer, is a critical part of any customer verification or identification process.

Thus, on Friday, Civic will reveal the world’s first crypto beer vending machine. To be unveiled at the Consensus 2018 conference in Manhattan that will take place next week, this product was created in partnership with Anheuser-Busch, the beverage giant.

The Purpose of the Crypto Beer Vending Machine

The team at Civic stated that they were looking for ways in which crypto technology could be brought to a more mainstream audience and to demystify it so that regular people will also understand the technology.

So the question becomes – what is so special about this beer vending machine? Well, it will only sell you beer if you are above 21 years of age, which is the legal age for drinking.

The Blockchain technology harnessed in this product uses transitional ID verifying methods to assess the age of a person. This means the technology is equipped to identify the different kinds of IDs a person might use and it can also handle the data that needs to be transmitted or stored to complete the verification process.

This beer vending machine is only a prototype to demonstrate how Blockchain technology can be harnessed for daily use and the idea is that it can be used for any age-restricted product.

The Bigger Picture

This vending machine is a great marketing strategy for Civic, but it serves an even bigger purpose for the company than just demonstrating the uses of crypto technology in daily life.

This product gives consumers a peek into the wide range of products that could very soon be connected to the Civic marketplace, which is scheduled to be launched in Q3 of this year.

Last June, Civic, in a pre-ICO offering, sold $33 million worth of its cryptocurrency token CVC to investors for this new protocol. Today, even before its launch, the marketplace is already worth $113 million. The idea is that banks and other institutions that store data that is needed to conduct KYC processes could now offer this as a service to their customers via the Civic network.

The CVC token, while not being used in the demo at the Consensus 2018 conference next week, could be integrated into future products. The idea is that products that need to verify the validity of an ID would need to use CVC cryptos to function.