Identity verification technology company Civic Technologies has released a free tool to combat bot activity in Solana (SOL) -based NFT launches.
According to an announcement on November 8, Civic’s new “Ignite Pass” tool will filter out bots requiring shoppers to complete a life check before being approved to make NFT purchases.
The Civic website notes that Users will need to take a video selfie to verify, and once verification is complete, an Ignite Pass will be issued to their wallet address. The pass also remains active for 24 hours to “limit the options of malicious botters that verify multiple wallets.”
The website also notes that “Civic does not store this selfie video”, but it does not clarify whether the data is deleted or stored elsewhere.
Ignite Pass is a free version of the firm’s knowledge of customer compliance (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) toolkit, Civic Pass. The tools are designed for decentralized financial platforms (DeFi), NFT markets, and public blockchains.
The CEO of Civic Technologies, Chris Hart, emphasized the revolutionary capabilities that non-fungible tokens have recently unlocked for artists, lamenting the negative impact bots are having on creators:
“Bots are more than a nuisance: they are destroying the trust communities have built, as well as the future prospects of their creators.”
The bots go crazy
In February of this year, Dapper Lab’s NBA Top Shot was forced to to delay the launch of a new series of Premium Packs due to high levels of bot activity on the platform.
The following month, Many users of the NFT MoonCats complained that the project had been invaded by bots programmed to accumulate new cats the moment they were launched online.
In response to bots, MoonCat developers Ponderware conducted a vote to decide whether or not to destroy a private key containing a collection of rare MoonCat NFTs, and 72% of the community voted “yes” during the 48 hour survey.
In September, TIME magazine sold out 4,676 NFTs in less than a minute, and Paradigm researcher Anish Agnihotri attributed fast sales to bot activity:
“Many people knew about the mainnet deployment in advance and were able to plan their bot transactions in advance.”
Increased activity from bots targeting Grape Protocol’s Initial DEX Offering (IDO) also caused the Solana network to crash. disconnect for approximately 17 hours in September.
The Solana Foundation called the incident a “denial of service attack” and estimated that the bots had saturated the network with a transaction load of approximately 400,000 per second.
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