In a moment of confusion and to the dismay of some, CIVIC ended it’s crowdsale yesterday around 5PM.
They later announced on their website that they had reached their goal of $33 million in the token sale. As you can see in the above tweet, they say this was spread over 10,000 orders, making the average or somewhere pretty high.
This should come as no surprise, since the identity/voting sectors of blockchain technology are seen as highly lucrative (government contracts as well as large organizational purposes) by virtually all sectors of the big leagues. No one envisions paper voting or counterfeit-enabled identification systems in 50, 100 years, so of course a well-organized project like CIVIC, with help from heavyweights like Jeff Garzik, is going to perform well. As such, writer Justin O’Connell appears to have been conservative in his 8.0/10 rating at our sister site, Hacked.com. Not really, though. It’s nearly impossible to earn 10/10 from a given analyst – no one can predict the future.
Wojtek Palczynski on Twitter asked Vinny Lingham, CEO of CIVIC, why the Ethereum congestion issue should affect Bitcoin purchases. Lingham gave the most obvious response: that would be terribly unfair to those planning to invest via Ethereum. Such investors were doubly locked since they would further be unable to exit Eth to get in through BTC. He added that this move also had to do with counting the actual contributions to ensure the cap wasn’t broken:
Luckily for those who didn’t get to invest in CIVIC in time, there will be many more plays in the identification/government sector of blockchain technology. There will also be plays in several other aspects of it, such as immutable tracking ledgers for shipping outfits, educational purposes such as grade tracking and other student data, and more.
These other-than-strictly-financial plays will eventually grow into their own industry, one day becoming almost unrecognizable from the financial side of the technology, but still being closely related, in much the same way that business and government are today. This is the sort of paradigm shift that the blockchain and other decentralized technologies present for the future, wherein entire industries will be disrupted and forced to adapt or fade. There are very few parts of modern life that blockchain could not have a significant impact upon.
CIVIC may be among the first truly serious plays of this nature. Another notable one would, of course, be Factom, who specialize in using the blockchain to essentially “notarize” documents and records. While some may be upset that they missed out on this opportunity, others are sure to follow. And while such news is now covered in major papers around the world, those with an edge will still be those reading the industry-specific papers who’ve been here from the beginning, like CCN.