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Blockchain Identity Firm Civic Promotes Chris Hart to CEO

Vinny Lingham is stepping down from the role and will become executive chairman of the board.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 1:41 p.m. Published Aug 18, 2021, 4:00 p.m.

Civic – a company that provides technology to verify identification on blockchains – is promoting Chris Hart, its chief operating officer, to CEO, Vinny Lingham, the current CEO, announced in a blog post on Wednesday.

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Hart has served as the company’s COO since 2017.
As part of the change, Lingham will become Civic’s executive chairman of the board. The South African entrepreneur co-founded the company in 2016.
Lingham wrote that last summer, Civic decided to move to an “ecosystem that can support a high volume B2B model,” given the impact of high Ethereum gas fees on its wallet product. That shift was one of the main reasons Civic moved early to integrate with the Solana blockchain.

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Nelson Wang

Nelson edits features and opinion stories and was previously CoinDesk’s U.S. News Editor for the East Coast. He has also been an editor at Unchained and DL News, and prior to working at CoinDesk, he was the technology stocks editor and consumer stocks editor at TheStreet. He has also held editing positions at Yahoo.com and Condé Nast Portfolio’s website, and was the content director for aMedia, an Asian American media company. Nelson grew up on Long Island, New York and went to Harvard College, earning a degree in Social Studies. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.