Congratulations to the Verifiable AI Hackathon Winners!

The Verifiable AI Hackathon 2025, hosted by cheqd in collaboration with Dorahacks, Verida, and Sprite+, brought together builders, developers, and visionaries working at the intersection of AI, verifiable credentials, and decentralised infrastructure.

The hackathon was split into two cheqd main tracks:

  1. Agentic Economy & AI Agents
  2. Content Credentials & Others

Each track challenged participants to solve some of the biggest trust, provenance, and authenticity problems in AI and content workflows.

Besides, a special Verida Bounty was offered to projects that incorporated private, user-owned data via the Verida stack.

We have received an impressive amount of submissions. Upon reviewing all the solutions and the creativity, technical skill, and practical use of the cheqd and Verida stacks, the winners have now been selected. Here’s a closer look at the top projects.

cheqd Main Track: Agentic Economy & AI Agents

🥇 First Place – Identone

Project: Identone
Description: Verifiable voice based AI agent interactions
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26280

How it works:
Identone allows users to interact with AI agents via voice in a way that is verifiable, traceable, and provable. The user and the AI agent both receive Verifiable Credentials to verify their identities. Then, during a call, these credentials can be seamlessly exchanged to prove that the parties on each side of the phone are trusted and verified.  

How it utilises the cheqd infrastructure:

  • User and AI agent receive Verifiable Credentials signed by cheqd DIDs
  • Any cheqd DIDs and associated DID-Linked Resources can be validated in real-time during a phone call to prove account ownership or AI agent authorisation.

🥈 Second Place – Kith

Project: Kith
Description: AI Agent Passport for credentialing and scoring AI agents
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26335

How it works:
Kith creates digital passports for AI agents that store their credentials, scores, and behavioural history. This allows other systems to assess trustworthiness, verify claims, and decide whether to interact with or delegate tasks to an AI agent.

How it utilises the cheqd infrastructure:

  • Assigns a unique did:cheqd to every AI agent
  • Issues Verifiable Credentials for agent accreditation
  • Stores agent accreditations as DID-Linked Resources
  • Enables compounding trust score for agent based on number of credentials issued to it, and trustworthiness of issuers
  • Enables third party verification and score based selection via the cheqd trust model

🥉 Third Place – SNAILS

Project: SNAILS
Description: Dail Bot for verifiable identity and content in AI interactions on Telegram
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26288

How it works:
SNAILS built “Dail,” a Telegram bot that enables users to verify their identity, authenticate AI agents, and track the credibility of shared content in AI driven conversations.

How it utilises the cheqd infrastructure:

  • Issues Verifiable Credentials to Telegram users for identity proof
  • Validates the origin and authorship of AI generated or human shared content
  • Uses cheqd DIDs to distinguish humans vs AI agents in chats

cheqd Main Track: Content Credentials & Others  Solution

🥇 First Place – CheqDeep

Project: CheqDeep
Description: A decentralized solution for verifying media authenticity using cheqd’s blockchain technology.
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26299

How it works:
CheqDeep tackles the growing issue of fake or AI-generated media by allowing users to prove that their content is authentic, recorded by a human, at a specific time and place. Users upload a photo or video directly from their smartphone. The platform captures metadata, generates a unique DID for the creator, and links this to a DID Linked Resource that includes a timestamp and verification data. This results in a verifiable “proof of reality” for any media.

How it utilises the cheqd infrastructure:

  • DID Linked Resources are used to anchor media metadata securely.
  • The cheqd blockchain provides the timestamped, tamper-proof record of creation and origin.
  • This forms a chain of custody that can be independently verified — critical for journalism, legal evidence, digital art, and content rights.

🥈 Second Place – Trusty Bytes

Project: Trusty Bytes
Description: A marketplace that enables AI agents to access and verify trustworthy datasets using cheqd and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26048

How it works:
Trusty Bytes connects AI agents to high-quality datasets in a decentralized data marketplace. Data providers list their datasets, which users can purchase via smart contracts. Once purchased, users receive a Verifiable Credential (VC) containing metadata about the dataset. AI agents authenticate via an access key, connect to the MCP server, and retrieve data. They can also verify the source using trust information from the cheqd network.

How it utilises the cheqd infrastructure:

  • Verifiable Credentials are issued on cheqd to prove dataset origin and trustworthiness.
  • Each dataset is linked to a DID of the data provider, ensuring agents only consume verified and credible data.
  • The trust network ensures the provenance and integrity of every dataset ingested by agents.

🥉 Third Place – crdbl

Project: crdbl
Description: A platform to make research, journalism, AI workflows, and digital content ownership auditable and verifiable.
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26336

How it works:
crdbl turns any human or AI-generated content into a verifiable credential — called a “crdbl” — tied to a decentralized identifier. These crdbls can reference each other, allowing for recursive provenance checking by AI engines. This builds a composable, cryptographically linked graph of trust. Users can issue and verify crdbls through a browser extension or programmatically via an API.

How it utilises the cheqd infrastructure:

  • DIDs and VCs form the foundation of crdbl’s trust model.
  • cheqd anchors every crdbl, enabling full traceability of claims and sources.
  • The system creates a self reinforcing network of verified assertions, making it easier to distinguish credible content from misinformation or unverified AI outputs.

Verida Bounty: Build an Agent incorporating Private User Data

🎖 Honourable Mention – Viskify

Project: Viskify
Description: An AI assisted talent verification platform that issues verifiable credentials for, candidates, recruiters and teams.
Submission: https://dorahacks.io/buidl/26297

How it works:
Viskify allows candidates to connect their private data sources (Telegram, Gmail, etc.) through the Verida Vault, and gives AI-assisted summaries of their professional qualifications. After consent-based access is granted, recruiters receive real-time insights and verified credentials. Viskify uses deterministic DIDs for teams and issuers, and integrates credential issuance and verification via API.

How it utilises the Verida infrastructure:

  • Verida’s encrypted data vault gives users full control over private data, accessed only with consent.
  • LLM powered analysis of this data provides structured insights while preserving privacy.
  • The platform integrates Verida’s secure data layer with cheqd’s credential issuance APIs to build an AI-friendly, privacy-preserving hiring system.

Wrapping Up

The Verifiable AI Hackathon 2025 showcased how powerful trust infrastructure can be when combined with emerging AI use cases. From authenticating media to building AI-aware marketplaces and content provenance layers, these projects pave the way for a more trustworthy digital future.

We’re incredibly proud of what the builders accomplished and we’re just getting started. The cheqd ecosystem is bright ahead!

If you’re interested in enabling trust in your AI model or build content credentials, feel free to give us a shout at [email protected] 

VERA and cheqd Partner to Launch Verified Digital Identity and Communication Across Africa and Beyond

The partnership brings cheqd’s decentralised identity infrastructure to VERA’s encrypted B2B messaging platform, enabling instant, verified communication for companies in South Africa and globally.

VERA, a secure B2B communications platform, has partnered with cheqd, a leader in decentralised identity and credential infrastructure, to deliver trusted digital identity and secure messaging for  businesses in South Africa and beyond. VERA is conducting a beta launch as of June 1st, tailored for South African companies, with a full MVP rollout expected by the end of August 2025. This collaboration enables a verifiable digital ID ecosystem that empowers businesses to communicate and transact with confidence.

“VERA solves a genuine problem which affects ourselves and every company worldwide: invoice manipulation fraud. Every week we receive invoices by email attempting to defraud us. VERA’s solution ensures that every company and individual on the platform are verified. This is a great step towards our mission where verified identity is seamlessly built into the fabric of how companies interact and collaborate,” said Fraser Edwards, Co-founder and CEO of cheqd, commented.

As digital fraud and impersonation continue to grow, particularly in business communications and payments, trust has become a critical differentiator. VERA is building a platform that combines strong encryption with verifiable digital credentials (VCs), allowing businesses to protect sensitive conversations while instantly verifying who they’re dealing with.

By integrating cheqd’s advanced decentralised identity infrastructure, including support for Verifiable Credentials (VCs), AnonCreds, and DID-linked resources, VERA will enable trusted interactions at scale. This partnership unlocks the potential for businesses to onboard new suppliers, exchange critical documents, and share fraud-resistant invoices, all while proving the legitimacy of their counterparties in real time. This is especially impactful for industries like construction, procurement, and finance, where trust and timing are critical. 

“At VERA, we believe secure communication should also be verifiable. cheqd’s infrastructure allows us to not only protect conversations, but to prove the identity of participants in a way that’s scalable, privacy-respecting, and future-ready. Together, we’re building the foundations for a more trusted digital economy, starting in Africa, and scaling worldwide,” said  Max Coleman, Co-Founder of VERA. 

With this partnership, VERA and cheqd are positioning Africa at the forefront of this transformation, while also laying the foundations for cross-border interoperability with the EU, US, and UK. Looking ahead, this partnership also creates opportunities to introduce cheqd’s decentralised payment infrastructure and collaborate on verifiable AI solutions.

Join the VERA Waitlist: https://www.vera-id.io/waitlist

About Vera

Founded in January 2024, VERA is a secure B2B communication platform designed to eliminate fraud and build trust in digital business interactions. By combining strong encryption with verifiable credentials, VERA enables businesses to verify counterparties instantly and exchange sensitive information with confidence. Currently in beta in South Africa, VERA is planning to scale into the UK, US, and Europe to support secure, trusted communication across global markets.

About cheqd

cheqd is the trust and payment infrastructure to enable the creation of personalised AI, eID, digital credential businesses, and trust ecosystems. It provides privacy-preserving payments for data to incentivise its release from data silos, enabling previously impossible data combinations and unlocking new user experiences and personalised AI.

It provides bespoke network offerings and supports multiple credential formats to underpin identity frameworks such as eIDAS 2.0 in Europe, and beyond. Its industry-leading Trust Registries allow ecosystems to gate and govern themselves, creating permissioned, permeable, or permissionless trusted data ecosystems and trusted verified AI agents.