cheqd Quarterly Product Update (Q4)

Q4 2025 has been a busy quarter for the product team, heavily focussed on improving the quality of cheqd’s products across the board. We’ve made ledger improvements, block explorer optimisations and have added new features to cheqd Studio. We’ve also continued to refine and narrow our vAI product offering, which will become a crucial part of the product moving into 2026.

In this blog, we will breakdown our progress across four separate areas:

  • cheqd Studio
  • SDKs
  • Block Explorer
  • cheqd Network

Altogether, these updates bring the full cheqd offering to a very stable state, for enterprise-ready efficiency and scalability, moving into 2026.

cheqd Studio

Q4 on cheqd Studio has been heavily focussed on status lists, allowing users to revoke or suspend credentials or ecosystem members. 

We recently upgraded our SDKs to support W3C Bitstring Status List, the state-of-the-art method of recording credential status. Notably, cheqd has become the first ledger-based implementation of Bitstring Status List, allowing for Verifiable Credentials to be written to the ledger containing:

  • Strings of bits (1s, 0s, and other digits) that when decoded show which credentials are revoked or suspended
  • Custom statuses, whereby users can use status lists for concepts such as refresh services or other innovative status markers.

Through this work on the SDK, we have made a series of improvements to cheqd Studio and the latest user interface. Firstly, users should now be able to see our Status Lists tab, where it is possible to create and manage individual status lists for different purposes.

Upon opening a status list, users will be able to see metrics around how much of the status list has been used, and which credentials have been included within the status list, during issuance.

This allows users to have clear control of credentials, on chain and off chain, that they are managing the lifecycle of. On each credential, we also now show a credential status tab, where users can see information about the credential status list, as well as manage the credential status.

By default, we support revocation and suspension of credentials. Users can choose if they want to toggle-on credential status, with revoked credentials being permanently disabled, and suspended credentials being able to be re-enabled, after temporary suspension. 

We have applied the same work to our trust registries, with the feature to link existing status lists or create new status lists for ecosystems.

Within each ecosystem, we now also enable members to have their status updated, again with revocation and suspension statuses being the default. Allowing for nuanced management of trust registry relationships.

With revocation now fully implemented in cheqd Studio, the product stands as one of the most feature-complete and usable SSI applications on the market.

SDKs and Core Tooling

We have been closely working with the Credo SDK maintainers to ensure cheqd remains fully up to date with the upcoming major v0.6 release.

 

This has included some technical refactoring, helping Credo transition to supporting cheqd with ESM packages, rather than CommonJS. This futureproofs our integration with Credo, allowing for strategic partners like Animo, Anonyome, Hovi and DIDx to securely build applications on top. 

 

We have also fixed a bug with key authentication, ensuring that if there are multiple keys listed to update or deactivate a DID, that all keys need to sign to update the DID, rather than only one. This helps support more complex instances of key relationships in the identity world, such as for multisig security on cheqd DIDs. With DID Methods now moving towards formal standardization processes at Decentralized Identity Foundation, this helps strengthen cheqd’s position as the leading decentralized DID Method on the market.

Block Explorer

It’s been in our backlog for a while to update and improve our explorer. This quarter we’ve made a number of quality-of-life improvements to the explorer, to help our community better maintain full transparency of the network.

Firstly, we have fixed an ongoing bug with transaction filtering, which stopped working after our v4.x upgrade. Now, users can seamlessly filter by transaction type once again, which is very useful for monitoring DIDs and Resources on the network.

Additionally, we have re-enabled the Top Accounts feature, after it started displaying incorrect balances. This will allow the community to transparently monitor network funds across the largest account holders. 

We also have fixed a relatively recent bug on the Proposals page, which led to information about recent votes and governance proposals not displaying properly. We will continue to make quality of life improvements and bug fixes, to provide a much smoother experience overall of using the explorer.

cheqd Network

We have made one minor release within Q4 and have done all the work to launch our Oracle release at the start of 2026. 

This minor release (v4.1.6) ensured that Relayers on cheqd were not facing extortionate fee prices when providing relaying services. To mitigate against this cost, we whitelisted a number of transactions used in the relaying process, in line with other Cosmos networks facing a similar issue. 

Our next major release for the Oracle is now rolled out on our internal devnet and has been thoroughly tested. We will be releasing a guide for validators to securely transition to the next major version in January 2026, upgrading to testnet and then mainnet. This release will stabilise pricing for all identity transactions on the network against fixed dollar values, giving cheqd’s customers and partners far more confidence in using the network, without price volatility. We expect this release to pave the way for new clients to launch live on cheqd mainnet with strong guarantees around pricing. 

What’s Coming Next?

In 2026, while continuing to improve our existing services, we are expecting to target the AI market much more closely. In the past months, we have been refining our verifiable AI offering, learning from the market about where the burning problems are that require high assurance and verification. Through this research, we have been able to form clear hypotheses around where innovations such as trust registries can apply to AI Agents, or how reputation can be added to AI Marketplaces. We will continue to share more on this focus as we move into 2026.

At the same time, we are expecting an influx of mainnet traffic from existing partners, with pilot projects moving to production projects. As such, we will need to carefully monitor and optimise our ledger and services accordingly, to scale alongside these customers. Our Q1 2026 release of the Oracle module will help bring these partners on seamlessly with stable and clear ledger pricing. 

Overall, we are proud of what we have achieved in Q4, and 2025 more broadly, and we are excited to carry this momentum into the new year!