Civic Is Shutting Down. Here Is What to Use Instead.

Civic announced the sunsetting of Civic Pass, their identity verification product, in mid-2025. Platforms that relied on Civic for user verification need an alternative. Here is what to consider.

What Civic Did

Civic provided blockchain-based identity verification, primarily for Web3 projects. Civic Pass served as a sybil resistance tool for token gating, airdrops, and governance voting. It required KYC-level document verification tied to wallet addresses.

Why Civic Failed

Civic's model had fundamental challenges: it stored PII (creating liability), required document uploads (adding friction), was blockchain-specific (limiting market), and the crypto token economics created misaligned incentives between users and the platform.

POY Verify as a Civic Alternative

Migration Guide

If you are migrating from Civic Pass:

1. Replace Civic Pass verification checks with POY Verify API calls
2. Map existing verified users to POY enrollments (users re-verify once)
3. Update smart contracts to check POY verification status instead of Civic Pass
4. Remove Civic SDK dependencies

The migration typically takes less than a day for most integrations.

About POY Verify

POY Verify is the first universal human verification system built on zero-data architecture. Unlike traditional identity verification services that collect, transmit, and store your biometric data on their servers, POY Verify processes everything inside your smartphone's Secure Enclave - a physically separate processor with its own encrypted memory that even the operating system cannot access. No biometric data ever leaves your device. No personal information is ever collected. No databases exist to breach.

The system works in 30 seconds: your device's hardware sensors (3D depth cameras, infrared emitters, and motion detectors) confirm a living human is physically present. A cryptographic key pair is generated inside the Secure Enclave. The private key never leaves the device. The public key is registered with POY's verification registry. You are now a verified human on the internet - with zero personal data exposed.

Why Human Verification Matters

The internet was built without a way to prove a human being is on the other end of a connection. This architectural gap has created a trust crisis of unprecedented scale. Over 64% of all web traffic is now non-human - bots, scrapers, and automated agents that create fake accounts, post fake reviews, manipulate engagement metrics, and impersonate real people. Deepfake technology has increased 500% since 2024, enabling AI-generated faces, voices, and videos that are indistinguishable from real humans. Deepfake-enabled fraud exceeded $25 billion in losses in 2025 alone.

Traditional verification methods have failed to keep pace. CAPTCHAs are solved by AI with 99.8% accuracy. Phone verification is bypassed by SIM farms selling numbers for cents. Email verification is defeated by disposable address services. Document uploads create massive data breach liability while excluding the 1.4 billion people worldwide who lack government-issued identification. The tools of fraud have outpaced the tools of verification.

POY Verify exists to close this gap. By using hardware-based biometric liveness detection with zero data collection, it provides definitive proof that a real human is present - without the privacy sacrifices, regulatory burden, or exclusion that traditional methods create. The result is a verification layer that works for every human, on every platform, in every country, at zero cost to the individual.

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