Competition — pitch cheqd

It’s COMPETITION TIME ⌚ 🎆

TL;dr

Winner: 5,000 $CHEQ
Runner-up: 2,000 $CHEQ
Competition: 2 minutes cheqd pitch
Duration: 2 weeks — from Fri 27 Jan to Fri 10 Feb at 11am UTC

Thanks to your efforts, Fraser will be heading to the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona, Feb 15–17, 2023. And, the boss has already prepared and submitted a killer pitch to the EBC awards.

What does this have to do with a competition, you ask? 🤔

You’ll recall our SSI in 60 seconds competition from last year, where the community had a chance to explain self-sovereign identity using memes, videos and infographics. This time, it is all about how you pitch cheqd.

Source: Cambridge Dictionary
Share with us how you pitch cheqd to your connections, friends, and colleagues. You can be as serious or as funny as you like, and throw in a meme, a video or infographic.

Here are the rules:

  1. The pitch has to be done in 2 minutes or less
  2. You can only submit one entry
  3. Tweets (including tweetstorms), voice messages, videos, and images are accepted on Twitter, Discord, and Telegram if you use the hashtag #cheqdPitch

Our team will forward all submissions (even if just a screenshot) to the
#🎤-pitch channel on Discord and pick their two favourite pitches.

Winner will receive 5,000 $CHEQ and the runner up 2,000 $CHEQ.

This competition will run for two weeks starting Friday 27th January and will end on Friday 10th February at 11am (that’s the time we’ll stop accepting entries to the competition). 🎁

Good luck and we’re looking forward to seeing your pitch.

[Closed] SSI in 60 seconds or less Competition

cheqd-Blog-SSI_in_60s

Hello cheqmates!

Winners

MEMES 🥇

Winner for the most engaged meme goes to this entry by Hendai18
The meme chosen by the team goes to this entry by risk22_

VIDEOS 🥇

Winner for the most engaged video goes to this entry by Vasco789
The video chosen by the team goes to this entry by zhenonx

INFOGRAPHICS 🥇

Winner for the most engaged infographic goes to this entry by babymrwizard
The infographic chosen by the team goes to this entry by JhonWickETH

—

It has been a while since we ran our last ‘official competition’ (I’m aware that Matt is running some unofficial competitions during weekdays late at night — naughty naughty Matt) so we thought it would be fun to see how good your understanding of Self-Sovereign Identity is.

Join our SSI in 60 seconds or less competition!

To participate simply follow these steps:

The video, infographic, or meme has to be on topic. You need to explain what Self-sovereign identity is in 60 seconds or less. If you’re creating an infographic, people should not spend more than 60 seconds to read it, if it’s a video it can’t be longer than 60 seconds.

We will pick the winner based on creativity and clarity of the explanation, so focus on being able to summarise what SSI is. Remember, you can use facts, stories, analogies, examples, use cases… be free and creative!

Get inspired by our video below.

6 Winners

We will select TWO winners for each category (video, infographic, and meme). We will pick our favourite one and the other will be picked based on the amount of engagement/interaction the entry had.

Prize: 1,500 $CHEQ per winner

Winners will be announced on the 11th October at 11pm GMT+1.

Additional information

  1. You can submit as many entries as you want in any category
  2. You must submit an original entry
  3. We reserve the right to use any of the entries in our community, presentation, or any other material that we see fit
  4. NSFW materials will not be accepted/considered
  5. We reserve the right to decide on giving out a surprise reward if our community grows in number by the end of the competition

Get ready, set, GO CREATE cheqmates. Good luck.

Data Wars: Return of the Cosmos Community Missions

Update

This cheqd airdrop has been successfully completed, resulting in many happy $CHEQ holders 🎉 We love working with our community and keep on surprising them. Make sure to join us to be the first to hear about our next event 👉 Twitter, Telegram and Discord.

#phrasebethelord

Fellow cheqmates of the Rebel Alliance! We return bearing news that the final Cosmos Community mission is here. It’s not hard but you’ll have to process a lot of information. Use the Force to find the way to the rewards and beware of the Dark Side that wants to steal your data and proceed with…

We’ve taken some artistic licence while creating this mission. We hate to burst your bubble but to succeed in this mission you’ll have to be…

You may have to put your pride aside to do some grinding before unlocking the rewards. Remember, it should be a 👇

So open your creative valve and pick up a pen to decode clues much like the nuclear physicists who invented hyperdrive had to!

As you embark on this crazy adventure to be the first to crack the mystery, you may find that keeping a sunny disposition will be core to being victorious.

Find your voice, Padawan, as you become cheqd’s ally in the Data Wars Rebel Alliance by being able to explain what self-sovereign identity (SSI) is, how our tokenomics works, and learn more about how our network gives you complete control of your data.

If you haven’t figured it out already, Mission 3 is akin to a puzzle genre game, similar to Tetris. (Although, one could say that a Tetris screen looks like the…).

You might also find that building bridges with other cheqmates gives you an edge by putting many heads together: so ask your friends, your parents and other members of the CHEQ community for help.

But also remember…with great effort comes great rewards.

With great quotes come great movie franchises

Big enough for you to foot the bill for a celebration with your mates, but, let’s be honest, not enough to pay for your kid’s tuition…

Are you in a treasure-hunting state of mind? Are you ready to claim your bounty before anyone else? We’ve already given you two very big clues in this blog post.

May the Fourth be with you…

Mission Two Airdrop – Claim Update

cheqd-Cosmos Airdrop Claim Mission 2 Rewards

CHEQ Airdrop Update

This cheqd airdrop has been successfully completed, resulting in many happy $CHEQ holders 🎉 We love working with our community and keep on surprising them. Make sure to join us to be the first to hear about our next event 👉 Twitter, Telegram and Discord.

Community… you’ll be able to claim your Mission Two rewards very soon!

Hey, cheqmates! We originally planned on making Mission Two, Stage One claims for our airdrop available this week (week starting 14th March 2022), but based on the feedback that we have received, we’ll move it tothe middle of next week, 23rd March 2022, making it easier for you to claim all of your rewards in one go!

Mission Two: Reminder & Update

WHAT SNAPSHOTS HAVE ALREADY BEEN TAKEN?

To be eligible for the rewards, a token wallet must already have been staking the following minimum amounts at the time the snapshots were taken:

  1. 10 ATOM: Snapshot taken at 10 March 2022 17:29:05 UTC
  2. 20 JUNO: Snapshot taken at 10 March 2022 14:55:27 UTC
  3. 20 OSMO: Snapshot taken at 10 March 2022 13:57:29 UTC
  4. 100 CHEQ: Snapshot taken 18 March 2022 14:22:12 UTC

CAN I STILL DO ANYTHING TO PARTICIPATE?

Bonding a minimum amount of CHEQ tokens to the specified pools on Osmosis DEX to get additional rewards. The deadline for this step is Monday, 21st March 2022 at 12:00 UTC. You must bond the tokens in the liquidity pool; simply adding them to the pool is not enough.

  1. At least 250 CHEQ tokens (+ equivalent in OSMO) in CHEQ:OSMO LP: Bond at least 250 CHEQ tokens and an equivalent amount in OSMO in CHEQ:OSMO Pool #602 by the deadline.
  2. At least 250 CHEQ tokens (+ equivalent in ATOM) in CHEQ:ATOM LP: Bond at least 250 CHEQ tokens and an equivalent amount in ATOM in CHEQ:ATOM Pool #617 by the deadline.

When can I claim the rewards

You must go to our rewards site after Wednesday, 23rd March 2022 to check how many tokens you are eligible for, and to claim these to be distributed. We’re not going to be distributing the CHEQ tokens directly to your wallet.

AM I ELIGIBLE FOR THE UPCOMING REWARDS?

The eligibility criteria for staking $ATOM, $OSMO and $JUNO remains the same. For a more detailed view, please visit this page.

The eligibility criteria for staking $CHEQ and adding liquidity to the pool remains the same, but now you know when the snapshots took place and when the next one will take place. For a more detailed view, please visit this page.

What's next?

After Mission Two is complete, we’ll start Mission Three, which we’re very excited about!.

If you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter, join our Telegram group and Discord server for more information. Come and say hi!

Cosmos Community Mission Two

cheqd-Cosmos_Community_Airdrop-II-2022

Cosmos Community update

This cheqd airdrop has been successfully completed, resulting in many happy $CHEQ holders 🎉 We love working with our community and keep on surprising them. Make sure to join us to be the first to hear about our next event 👉 Twitter, Telegram and Discord.

Classic #Cosmos

Howdy community,

Thank you so much for your participation in our first mission. The engagement was fantastic and at the same time a bit overwhelming. Let me be very candid, we didn’t expect so much engagement! That’s why we had to pull the plug on day two, as we had overreached our maximum number of entries.

If you feel there’s something wrong with your airdrop please raise a ticket on the following link and we’ll cheq it for you: https://support.cheqd.io/

Here are some cool numbers from Mission one.

Total number of entries: 25,729 (max number of participants was originally 20,000)

Eligible entries: ~15,500

Top 3 reasons for not being eligible:

  • Didn’t provide a cheqd wallet address (many provided ETH and BTC)
  • Didn’t follow us on Twitter
  • Didn’t join us on Telegram and/or Discord

Wrong wallet address:

  • ~9,000 people didn’t provide a wallet address
  • ~30 people provided the help text as their wallet address
  • >20 people provided a truncated cheqd wallet address (i.e. didn’t copy the FULL address “cheqd1xxx….xxx”
  • 1 person used >70 fake email addresses to have multiple entries
  • 1 person (possibly the same person) used >90 fake email addresses
  • 1 person shared a wallet’s MNEMONIC! 😩

Bonus: >50 individuals provided more than one wallet address from different networks linked to the same account

Twitter:

  • >8,000 people didn’t follow us on Twitter

Telegram/Discord

  • ~9,000 people didn’t join our Telegram group and/or Discord

Busiest day: February 23rd

Number of countries with at least one entry: 162

Top three countries with most entries:

  • Indonesia
  • Vietnam
  • Nigeria

Countries that participated in our 1st Mission

Our community also grew a lot:

  • Twitter: from ~25,000 to ~46,000
  • Telegram: from ~12,000 to ~26,000
  • Discord: from maybe 30 to ~15,000

In a nutshell, we only have to thank you for the support and engagement.

The reason for social-task based airdrop

We wanted everyone to have a little bit of $CHEQs to participate in our second Mission. The rewards are higher and also requires more involvement with Cosmos.

Cosmos, The Internet of Blockchains, is an ecosystem of interconnected apps and services. cheqd was built on Cosmos SDK so we’re part of this ever-growing ecosystem.

Therefore, we want to give back to the community. Either through the airdrop or by getting more people to know about Cosmos’ ecosystem.

First Mission. Status: Accomplished.

Airdrop reward

If you completed every task of the Mission, including referring a friend, you should have received 250 $CHEQs in your cheqd wallet.

Voting: JUNO is the Winner

If you completed all the tasks AND voted for Juno, you should have received an additional 50 $CHEQs.

Top three projects:

  1. Juno
  2. Secret Network
  3. OmniFlix

Ok, I got 250 $CHEQs (or 300), what’s next?

You should definitely stake your CHEQ tokens, and participate in our mission to build a decentralised governance system for digital identity. In addition to that, you can participate in the Osmosis DEX liquidity pools for CHEQ:OSMO (pool #602) or CHEQ:ATOM (pool #617).

Read this blog post on Liquidity Pool for more information on what it is and how you can participate in one.

Mission Two - Are you ready?

Mission Two is broken into two stages.

First stage - Cosmos

ATOM (block height 9703992), OSMO (block height 3534866), and JUNO (block height 2223587) chains on Thursday, 10th March 2022. For more information please visit this page. If you had been staking at least the following amounts…

  1. 10 ATOM
  2. 20 OSMO
  3. 20 JUNO

…you will be eligible to claim an airdrop of CHEQ tokens some time on the week commencing Monday 14th March on https://rewards.cheqd.io. We’ll let you know when the airdrop claim is live.

You will get a reward for each of the completed tasks above.

More $CHEQ for you to stake and especially to participate in our Liquidity Pools.

Note: The amount you need to stake is counted across all validators, not just a single validator.

Second Stage - cheqd

We really incentivise you to help cheqd by participating in our Liquidity Pools. To be eligible for more airdrops, do the following:

  1. Stake at least 100 $CHEQ — you can do it on any validator, with any amount, just make sure that the total amount staked is a 100 $CHEQ or more
  2. Add at least 250 $CHEQ and the equivalent in OSMO on Liquidity Pool 602 (i.e. CHEQ:OSMO with a 50/50 balance)
  3. Add at least 250 $CHEQ and the equivalent in ATOM on Liquidity Pool 617 (i.e. CHEQ:ATOM with a 50/50 balance)

For each of the tasks above that you complete, you will receive a reward. In other words, if you want to receive the maximum reward, you simply need to stake and participate in both Liquidity Pools.

You should be eligible to claim the reward on the same rewards page.

Recap

  1. If you completed all the tasks on Mission One, you should have been airdropped already. cheq out your cheqd wallet.
  2. Mission Two starts today Thursday 10th March 2022
  3. If you were already staking 10 $ATOM, $20 OSMO, and $20 JUNO before Thursday, 10th March 2022 — you’ll receive a reward PER chain. To use an example, if you were staking some $ATOM but not $OSMO or $JUNO, you’ll receive a one of three rewards available, whilst if you had staked $ATOM, $OSMO and $JUNO you’ll receive all three rewards
  4. Claim your Mission Two stage one airdrop sometime on the week commencing Monday 14th March 2022 — we’ll let you know when the site is live
  5. Add your airdrop to our Liquidity Pool 602 and Liquidity Pool 617, and stake 100 $CHEQ. More details on the deadline for this will be mentioned on the rewards site.
  6. Claim your Mission Two stage two airdrop — we’ll let you know the exact date soon
  7. Get ready for Mission Three

Final thoughts

Airdrops are not simple or easy to run. We get thousands of people trying to game the rules. It took us 3 more days than we originally planned to sort out all the wrong information people used in their entries, cleanse all the thousands of duplicate entries AND to give some people a second chance.

A good example of this, we clearly stated that you must provide a cheqd wallet address to be eligible for the airdrop. Surprise, surprise, we had more than 700 entries that provided a range of other wallet addresses (cosmos, osmo, juno, regen, umee, etc.).

Instead of simply removing them, we decided to convert all these wallets to cheq, as we appreciate the effort people have put to spread the word about cheqd.

But… and there’s always ‘buts’… we could easily see that many people tried to pull a fast one on us and in fact provided different network addresses for the same wallet. Let’s be frank, my frens, our team has identity experts, we can’t be fooled that easily.

Going through this experience, we see that projects running airdrops are crying out for a better identity solution, so we might explore this opportunity and help out other projects that are thinking about doing airdrops.

And, that’s it folks… if you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter, join our Telegram group and Discord server for more information. Come and say hi!

Cosmos Community Airdrop

cheqd-Cosmos_Community_Airdrop-2022

THREE MISSIONS. ONE GOAL. GET OWNERSHIP AND FULL CONTROL OF OUR DATA.

For the Cosmonauts and our community members in the USA, we’re sorry to say that you won’t be eligible for this airdrop due to regulatory uncertainty. As you are aware, the USA is a big market for us and we want to enter it with a clean bill of health. We’re thinking in ways to get you involved, so watch this space.

Hi community!

Back in December 2021, when everything was locked down in the UK, we ran our first Rewards Program. The goal back then was to reward our early community members, people that believed in our mission and helped us shape our network, grow our community, and educate our Telegram members and Twitter followers.

December was nuts. The engagement in our Telegram group and Twitter was so high that I went insane for a few weeks. And, I personally want to go insane again, so we’re pleased to announce our new Cosmos Community Airdrop!

This may or may not be our Head of Marketing & Community

This time we want the #IBCGang and the #Cosmonauts to be part of it.

Why?

Well, back then we were so focused on getting our network ready and live that we missed out on how engaged and loyal the Cosmos community is. My bad. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

A journey into the cosmos

Now, we invite you to join us in an adventure into the Cosmos. We’re looking to recruit Cosmonauts to help us reclaim ownership and full control of our data. We believe you should own your data, take it wherever and use it however you want. Our Cosmos Community Rewards will consist of three missions and… they will all be linked!

First mission

The socials — we want the whole Cosmos community to benefit from this program. However, we’re well aware that not everyone in the community knows about us, so to maximise reach we’ll kick-off with a follow us, invite your friends and share our name with your contacts.

This mission will officially start on Wednesday 23rd February and end on Wednesday 9th March at 11.45pm. It’s good to point out that to be fair with our Telegram community, we gave them a head start on the 22nd of February.

Due to the massive amount of interest, we’ll have to cap to around 20,000 Cosmonauts. As soon as we hit this number, we’ll consider this first mission accomplished.

One of the tasks to complete the mission involves choosing another Cosmos project. We will add an extra reward for everyone that votes for the project that ends up with the most votes. We recommend you to invite your friends from other Cosmos projects to participate and vote.

1_iQNTEbqF7K7ernrINWuDWg

This may or may not be our Head of Marketing & Community

Second mission

Oh, the classic network snapshot.

Wait a minute, is that why you wanted us to invite our friends for the first airdrop? So they could participate in LP and get snaps… Oooooh.

Second mission

We’ll provide more details when the first mission is over. But… the rewards for this mission will be higher. 😉

Third mission

This one will be fun. I’m very excited about it, but our CTO asked me to keep it a secret. 🙊

More information will be shared when the second mission is over. However, stay tuned, this one will be amazing.

Nice, but... how much will the rewards be?

I can’t say it now, but you won’t be disappointed, ser.

Wise words from Yoda

Are you ready to help us in the fight against the dark forces that hold our data, and reclaim ownership and full control of our data? Take your data wherever and use it however you want. Be a rebel and join us in the Data Wars!

Start your mission here! https://rewards.cheqd.io/cosmos

Join our cheqd Ambassador Program

cheqd-Ambassador_Program-HS-2022

We’re excited to announce the launch of our Ambassador program. This program aims to recruit awesome ambassadors that will help us grow our community and make self-sovereign identity (SSI) a reality!

For you to be successful in this program, you’ll need to be able to articulate SSI, our use cases, partnerships, milestones, and achievements to a broader audience.

On our travels, we’ve found that not enough people are aware of SSI given it has the potential to:

  • Give you ownership of your data
  • Remove the need to ever create an account again
  • Eliminate passwords

Help us spread the word!

Requirements & Benefits

As an ambassador we expect you to promote cheqd and produce interesting, fun, and engaging content that will attract more people to our project.

If you’re considered a qualified candidate, you will receive special benefits and bonuses depending on your role and the degree of your contributions.

Here are the benefits you’ll enjoy:

  1. Join the cheqd OG group in Discord
  2. Work closely with the cheqd team
  3. Advise marketing decision-making process as a community representative
  4. Opportunity for a full-time job
  5. Get the chance to earn surprise rewards

Roles, Responsibilities & Bonuses

Role

Responsibility

Bonus

Blogger

Write articles to explain cheqd and its use cases to different audiences. Share project updates and events. Publish relevant blog posts regularly.

20-200 USDT/CHEQ per article depending on the content. 

Translator

Translate our content into different languages.

20-200 USDT/CHEQ depending on the number of content translated.

Designer

Create memes, stickers and other visual content.

10-200 USDT/CHEQ depending on the content.

Video maker

Create explainers, memes, and how-to videos.

50-300 USDT/CHEQ depending on the content.

Creative/Guerrilla activities 

Surprise us!

Up to 2,000 USDT/CHEQ depending on the result.

Every single work MUST BE approved by the core team. Your bonus will be added and paid in full at the end of the month. Be aware that after content is approved by our team, it will then become public and we reserve the right to use it as we see fit.

If you really amaze us, you might get a surprise bonus!

All qualified applicants will have to go through a one-month probationary period, after that you’ll formally be considered a cheq Ambassador! To maintain your Ambassador status you’ll need to contribute with at least three tasks a month.

This is an ever-evolving program so please bear in mind that changes might happen in a short notice.

Want to be a cheqd Ambassador? Fantastic, please fill in the form below and we’ll get in touch!

[Closed] cheqd Memes Competition!

cheqds meme competition original-1

This was a tough one. All entries were fantastic! 🤩

On behalf of our whole team, I’d like to thank you all 🙏 for the entries and for the LOLs. 🤣

And the winners are… 🥁🥁🥁

Best video
🏆 @JuraganLaron — https://twitter.com/JuraganLaron/status/1435948406472540166

Best classic meme
🏆 @harttlock — https://twitter.com/harttlock/status/1437185309536501767/photo/1 (Family Guy parody)

Best gif
🏆 @bhelekesehe — https://twitter.com/bhelekesehe/status/1436940848353079297

The other finalists are (no particular order):
🏅 @Yadhukrishna131 — https://twitter.com/YadhuKr88660816/status/1437079639894073348

🏅 @gorengtemp3 — https://twitter.com/gorengtemp3/status/1437803236644163594

🏅 @nafihpp — https://twitter.com/nafih00681328/status/1437696309973057538/photo/3 (Puzzle)

🏅 @Laughlife69 — https://twitter.com/todvlog/status/1436412983471587328

🏅 @paklekprat — https://twitter.com/subri433/status/1438540587020419075

🏅 @Arifin892 — https://twitter.com/SasukeZulo/status/1437775030285488150

🏅 @Anargy4 — https://twitter.com/DwiAnargya/status/1438509827131539457

Thanks to the success of our Sticker Pack Competition, we’re going bigger and louder in this new competition. Invite your friends and family to participate in our competition and maybe have them learn a bit more about self-sovereign identity (SSI).

The total prize money pot this time will be 2,000$. cheq it out!

TOP BEST

Video: 450$ USDT
Classic meme: 275$ USDT
GIF: 275$ USDT

And… 1,000$ USDT to be shared amongst 10 finalists.

Remember, for your video, meme or gif to be considered it HAS to be related to cheqd, self-sovereign identity or crypto.

To participate in the competition, follow these steps:

  1. Join the cheqd Telegram Group
  2. Follow cheqd on Twitter: @cheqd_io
  3. Drop your entry in the thread and tag a friend
  4. Take a screenshot of your entry and send to [email protected] along with your Twitter account and Telegram username. The subject line should be “cheqd MEMES COMPETITION”.
  5. Winners will be announced 17 September through the same email sent for your entry

Good luck and welcome to the cheqd community!

-cheqd team

Note : The data shared with us is solely for identification purposes. Participants need to have a valid Twitter account and Telegram username.

[Closed] Infographics & Animated Stickers Competition

Infographics & Animated Stickers Competition

Our network launch date is getting closer and closer… and to get more people to understand what cheqd is all about, we’re launching a new competition!

Best Use Case Infographic

1st place: 250$ USDT
2nd place: 175$ USDT
3rd place: 75$ USDT

Research this blog, Twitter, our website, and YouTube channel to learn about self-sovereign identity use cases.

Best Animated Sticker Pack

1st place: 250$ USDT
2nd place: 175$ USDT
3rd place: 75$ USDT

The sticker pack needs at least five animated stickers (they need to move!) with the following:

  1. Hello!
  2. Thank you
  3. LOL
  4. Welcome to our group
  5. Let’s go!

And, the more, the better. If your pack has more stickers, you’ll definitely have the edge over the other competitors. Non-animated stickers will not be considered.

To participate in the competition, follow these steps:

  1. Join the cheqd Telegram Group
  2. Follow cheqd on Twitter: @cheqd_io
  3. Drop your entry in the thread and tag a friend
  4. Take a screenshot of your entry and send it to [email protected] along with your Twitter account and Telegram username. The subject line should be “cheqd Infographics & Stickers Competition”.
  5. Winners will be announced 5th of November through the same email sent for your entry.

Good luck and welcome to the cheqd community!

-cheqd team

Note: The data shared with us is solely for identification purposes. Participants need to have a valid Twitter account and a valid Telegram username.

Self-sovereign identity use cases

Self-sovereign identity use cases

Co-authored by Eduardo Hotta and Elina Yumasheva

While self-sovereign identity (SSI) sounds like an unfamiliar concept for some, others are actively leveraging the technology to address industry-specific challenges — take the KYC trial of the Financial Conduct Authority or the IATA Travel Pass.

But before we go any further, let’s define what S­­SI is.

What is self-sovereign identity (SSI)?

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is an emerging concept for exchanging authentic and trusted data related to people, companies, and things in a much more secure and privacy-preserving way. Essentially, it gives the individual a verified master-copy of their own data, affording control over what information they share and removing the need to store personal data entirely in central databases. Watch SSI explained in 25 seconds here.

It could be key to unlocking access to banking, government benefits or other services, and as McKinsey Global Institute research suggests, it could boost economic growth by 3% in the UK in 2030.

Do we have a problem with digital identity?

Current identity solutions largely incentivise issuing/verifying organisations (the data controller) over the individual/company (data subject). The data subject (i.e. an individual or a company) at best has to directly pay (sometimes prohibitive) fees to acquire documents, and at worst, often have no control over their own data (as often in targeted advertising).

The bottom line is that the current identity model is fundamentally broken as it’s all built and controlled by third-party providers rather than individuals. The result of such a set-up from a user experience is that, on average, an individual has 130 to 200 different accounts tied to the same email address. This makes it in many ways a paradise for threat actors, as they can target organisations’ data silos and can use phishing and social engineering techniques to try and trick individuals into giving away their passwords to a multitude of accounts. Over time, data subjects have lost track of what data is being stored and by who.

Know Your Customers and Finance

When it comes to use cases, SSI has a variety of applications, and, arguably one of the most known within the Banking sector is Know Your Customer (KYC). Most processes that touch finance usually request user identity verification, such as transactions that require payment. SSI enables a reusable KYC concept that offers a much more seamless way of ID verification. When an ID verification is needed more often due to compliance or regulatory pressure, SSI can significantly reduce the friction for users improving a customer experience while providing a compliant service.

In short, current KYC is ‘single-use” while” KYC’ed SSI makes KYC’ recyclable’.

However, friction reduction goes beyond the Business to Consumer (B2C) space and applies to the Business to Business (B2B) use cases. SSI also provides traceable and auditable personally identifiable information (PII). Finally, as it’s also applicable across-industry, SSI ultimately speeds up the onboarding process for new customers and improves security by removing the unnecessary paper trail. This makes it a rather useful solution to enable mobile banking. One of the notable examples is the UK government, which launched a trial for their Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) using an SSI-powered solution for onboarding users.

SSI in Decentralised Finance and Crypto

Moving beyond traditional banking, the Centralised Decentralised Finance (CeDeFi) also sees a robust application for SSI. Since identity verification is equally required in both centralised and decentralised finance, with neither satisfied with the existing KYC and identity approaches, SSI can provide that identity layer that meets both worlds. It creates a bridge between traditional data-heavy interactions and an anonymous DeFi approach, while CeDeFI will provide the financial infrastructure for SSI adoption in a key market.

cheqd’s ultimate vision is to establish the payment rails for identity, initially self-sovereign identity without anyone needing to worry about the underlying technology. This perfectly aligns with the CeDeFi vision of providing a spectrum of financial services without the need to worry about whether they are centralised, decentralised or what technology they are built on. The blending of CeFi and DeFi also prevents the need for multiple, siloed identities, which is the problem SSI is built to solve.

Within the Crypto and DeFi space, SSI enables peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. One can share a small piece of identity information, i.e. a Telegram handle, to prove who they are without disclosing their identity publicly. This means no more test payments to check wallets. Another option is doing KYC’ed loan pools without storing the data — instead, only keeping ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers.

ssi use cases travel

Travel and SSI

The travel industry probably shows one of the most relatable SSI applications enforced by the pandemic developments. International and domestic travel has always required identity to be shared in the form of passports, visas and other documents. In the age of COVID-19, this has been made even more complex as another layer of health certification has been added. Take the ‘track and trace’ system, for instance; one of the biggest downsides is that a lot of personal information is shared with a vast number of third parties. One of the projects in this space is the Covid Credentials Initiative, which aims to develop ‘privacy-preserving verifiable credentials’ to spread the virus through the use of SSI.

Airlines are actively testing global credentials to verify health passports using SSI and digital identity with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) developing IATA Travel Pass. It stores encrypted data, such as verified test and/or vaccination results on the traveller’s mobile device, meaning it’s fully decentralised as there is no central repository for this information.

SSI use cases NFT-2

NFTs and SSI

In a nutshell, self-sovereign identity helps to prove who created, owned and/ or currently owns Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) across their lifecycle as well as providing ownership of fractions. SSI can solve the provenance issue regardless of the ledger NFTs are hosted on. SSI can enable a fully decentralised content consumption with payment and identity — in other words, consumption of media/content directly from the creator without a distribution channel. This can help creators to receive fair payments for their work and interact with their audiences directly. cheq out our thoughts on how NFT and SSI combined unlock a new gaming experience here.

Another issue that self-sovereign identity can address is identity tied to payments. There is currently no way to verify the identity of the payment receivers in Crypto/ DeFi transfers beyond the wallet address. It’s a problem even for low-volume transfers, but increasingly more so on high-value transfers. While there is always a need for anonymous payments in Crypto, there are occasions when it’s useful to verify who is receiving funds.

Other SSI use cases

While the list can go on, especially as various industries join the bandwagon and pick up the technology, there are a few notable examples. Decentralised storage is getting more traction as SSI can be implemented to manage participants’ data and store distributed files with decentralised access control. Decentralised identity and the technical standards involved (Verifiable Credentials and Decentralised Identifiers) can also be used for:

• E-commerce: Besides increasing transactional security and preventing potential e-commerce fraud, it reduces onboarding and payment friction. A few examples of existing projects include Barclaycard and OpenBazaar.

• Corporate or organisational identity: Making it easier to trust companies one is interacting with, especially over the internet. For instance, Bosch is participating in The IDunion network’s project that develops an internationally deployable SSI application for corporate identity and master data management.

• Product or package identity: Enabling more efficient and effective track and trace for real-world supply chains. The global blockchain supply chain market size is projected to reach circa $9,852 million by 2025, with a growth of more than 80% from 2018 to 2025.

And of course, the most exciting one is the metaverse. As metaverse is a very decentralised concept and is about privacy, control, openness and interoperability, its requirement for identity verification and trusted data elements should also be fully decentralised. The metaverse needs to be designed on open standards – with SSI and verifiable credentials hopefully playing a pivotal role here. Explore the symbiosis of metaverse and self-sovereign identity and how they fit within Web 3.0.

Conclusion

The beauty of this technology is that it addresses issues that are universal and applicable across industries. With more and more companies leveraging SSI, the list of use cases will grow fast, making SSI a reality soon. Take a look at the most comprehensive list of self-sovereign identity use cases here.