To Combat Solana's Bot Problem, Civic Unveils Free Digital ID for NFTs

Bots are a growing part of the decentralized experience. But they can also manipulate markets and cause massive headaches for blockchain developers. Read the full article by: Jason Nelson

Key Points:

• A little over a month ago now we saw Solana experience an outage on its network for about 17 hours. This left users unable to do anything on the blockchain in that time due to large amounts of bot activity.

• The bots were targeting the GRAPE token sale on Solana based exchange Raydium. So many bots were making the same play at the same time that it caused the network to crash.

• Civic is trying to combat the large scale issue that bots are becoming on all exchanges by leveraging their decentralized identity protocol to launch Ignite Pass. Civic says that it will require NFT buyers to prove their “liveness” so that bots do not buy up all the drops and mints.

• “Civic believes that a more level playing field is beneficial for all,” Hart told Decrypt via email. “In the places where bots are negatively manipulating NFT markets, we see an opportunity to help put guardrails in place.”

• This would be great for markets outside of the crypto space as we have seen in the past years with the same issues with sneaker drops and the PS5 fiasco. Bots just make it unfair for the regular individual to buy without having to go to the over priced reseller market. Civic also has a paid version that has KYC and AML capabilities for higher valued auctions as well.