Civic touts itself as a low-cost identity verification system on the blockchain, somewhat similar to Humaniq's model. The Civic ICO is coming up on June 21st, while Humaniq already had their ICOs in the past 2 months. In this post, I will give a brief description of the two tokens and my opinion on the two as an investment.
Humaniq
Humaniq has a coinmarketcap valuation of $28 million with 148 million coins in circulation. Humaniq raised $5.5 million in it's two ICOs. There are over 2 billion un-banked people in the world, and Humaniq is trying to solve that by using bio-metric id on low cost android cell phones. The idea is to give out phones to people who don't use banks, and each account would get some HMQ tokens upon creation.Civic
Civic's idea is slight different in that it isn't going to provide any cell phones. On their website, Civic is said to already have the bio-metric portion of the app done. Once they launch their token, they will sync the two and leverage cell phones people already own. Their target isn't un-banked people, but people with cell phones.My opinion
The following section is just my opinion. I am not affiliated with Civic, Humaniq, or any other crypto currency token. I don't own Humaniq or Civic tokens today. My goal is be honest, but I'm also new here so trying to navigate the proper Steemit etiquette. I don't want to offend anyone. If you disagree, please comment below and we can have a discussion.Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole
I agree with Humaniq that we need to solve the issue of having so many un-banked people in the world. Unfortunately, their app/phone combo won't solve it. Internet is needed to perform transactions, who would pay for the service for these phones? What makes people keep the tokens and not just dump them on day 1? Even if I give them the benefit of the doubt on that, where is the money to pay for these phones? I read somewhere that the phones cost $20...if Humaniq used all of their ICO money to buy phones, they would have 275k phones. What about the rest of the 1.9997 billion un-banked people? There is also too much vagueness and unclear info on their website about their previous ICOs. My rough estimates are that they only sold 30 million Humaniq tokens during the 2 ICOs (I could be wrong, very little info available openly). With total coins of 148 million, they should be valued 27.5M assuming price of the Ether they raised is still the same as ICO date. Ether is significantly more today than it was during their 2 ICOs....so if you invested in the ICO and still own Humaniq tokens today, you have lost money when compared to just holding Ether.Humaniq recently blogged about opening an office in San Francisco. Is that really necessary...San Francisco is expensive! Their funds will be gone quick and will probably have to do yet another ICO. I'm staying far far away from this one.
Civic
Now that I have convinced myself that Humaniq isn't a legitimate competitor to Civic, let's talk about Civic. According to the Civic website, they claim to already have a "working identity verification product that is available worldwide". I urge all of you reading this to go download the Civic app from the iPhone app store (or android). All it does is offer phone/email verification and also uses iPhone's built in finger print verification. Are you kidding me? I agree with Civic that there is a need for identity verification, but Civic's current feature isn't that. Gmail has 2 factor authentication, Coinbase has it, the Starbucks app probably has it already. I don't see the need for another coin just to get 2 factor authentication. Could Civic work on something much more sophisticated once they raise money...sure, and I hope they do. But, if they are being deceitful about an already working identity model, what else will they lie about in the future?The good news is that we are in a really hot ICO environment. To go along with that, Civic has some big names involved like Gyft founder Vinny Lingham. Ponzi schemes can be profitable if you get in early enough. Even with my harsh words above, I'm considering investing in this ICO...just so I can dump the coins on day 1 and hopefully double or triple up my investment.
Conclusion
Humaniq is not a viable business model and is doomed for failure...there is no sugar coating it. I want to help people in the world too, but this isn't realistic. I don't trust Civic based on the info they have provided so far, their identify verification app is complete garbage. However, I do think the ICO can be profitable. And I'm not completely writing Civic off in the long term, I will wait on the sidelines to see how things develop.I'm sorry if I offended anyone that is a supporter of Humaniq or Civic. This is just my opinion. All markets need buyers and sellers...so it's all good.