The role of Web3 in addressing the climate crisis

cheqd climate week london

To celebrate London Climate Action week, we’re hosting a live discussion on Tuesday at 2 pm BST.

You will learn about Web3 and blockchain companies’ role in addressing the climate crisis and how to be carbon positive 🌍  We’ll also explore the broader landscape such as the options for offsetting between traditional and crypto-enabled.

As part of the interactive discussion, we’ll also delve into the following:
  • Understanding the difference between various types of blockchains
  • Carbon calculation methodologies – how to get started
  • Navigating different offset options – crypto vs traditional
  • What’s the next big thing in this space?
Join us here and make sure to spread the word among your network.

cheqd meta-analysis finds the Self-Sovereign Identity market is worth over $550 billion

SSI whitepaper preview-2-1-1-1

LONDON, March 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — cheqd, a technology company enabling individuals and organisations to take full control of their data, has conducted a meta-analysis, as part of a new whitepaper, estimating the potential of the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) market to be over $550 billion annually. This staggering figure reflects the full value of people’s data and its usages. It is based upon areas of opportunity including finance, compliance (KYC), gaming, NFTs, the Metaverse, Official ID, and E-Commerce amongst others.  

The whitepaper, entitled ‘Self-Sovereign Identity; How big is the market opportunity?’ aims to address the lack of clarity on the total addressable market value for SSI, establishing a credible baseline that can then be iterated upon by the community.

SSI is an emerging user-centric concept for exchanging authentic and trusted data, including people and organisations, in a more secure manner. The estimated figure of $550 billion affirms cheqd’s belief in the scale and value of SSI technology, which has already seen an exponential increase in tangible use cases in 2021 and 2022, proving foundational to the implementation of NHS Staff Passports as well as the IATA Travel Pass.

The current identity model is controlled by third-party providers who generate the majority of the value from this data. This centralised structure brings with it a host of security threats, laying open the potential for hackers to target companies’ data siloes on mass scales or trick individuals into giving away their passwords. In the United States alone, identity theft losses cost $502.5 billion in 2019 and increased to $712.4 billion in 2020. In the UK, annual UK-issued debit and credit card identity thefts reached a value of £29.7 million in 2020.

cheqd aims to redress these structural markets issues by inverting data ownership, allowing individuals to create a single profile that they control and share with companies as and when they choose.

cheqd CEO, Fraser Edwards comments, “When the Economist described data as the new oil, it was not wrong. This whitepaper confirms our sense of the increasing utility and relevance of SSI and digital identity, but also lays out, for the first time, the sheer scope and tangible value of the technology. It is undeniable that SSI can revolutionise the ways individuals and companies exchange data across industries as diverse as finance, gaming, and travel. We are proud to stand at the forefront of this transformation, giving people ownership of their digital lives and putting them in control for the first time.”

Click here to read the whitepaper in full; cheqd’s methodology has been published in detail so that all market participants are able to use the data for their own calculations.

About cheqd

cheqd is a technology company enabling individuals and organisations to take full control of their data. It provides payment rails, customisable commercial models and governance structures for authentic data, including self-sovereign identity (SSI). Based on blockchain technology, cheqd is built upon a public permissionless network with a dedicated token – $CHEQ. 

Founded in 2021 by CEO Fraser Edwards and CTO Ankur Banerjee, cheqd is a driver for innovation backed by Outlier Ventures, Evernym, TitanBlock, 3GR, Cosmos’ Tendermint Ventures and private investors, receiving a total raise of just over £2.4 million in its Seed investment round.

For enquiries, please contact:

Alexandra Santos
[email protected]
07972 854508

Marketing in a privacy-preserving way

marketing in a privacy preserving way

This is the first blog post of a series of three.

“Marketing in a privacy-preserving way” used in the same sentence, I bet, sounds like an oxymoron for a majority of marketers. Marketing is well known to surpass any personal boundaries whatsoever in service of communicating the greatness of that product or service that you’re unaware of yet but should totally get; otherwise, your life will be miserable / you won’t fix that problem of yours (perhaps you didn’t know the issue existed) / <add your variation here>.

What prompted us to look into the subject?

Exploring the possibilities of marketing that respects one’s personal privacy has been on our radar for an apparent reason. Giving individuals and organisations back their privacy and control of their data is our mission and the very essence of what unites our team. We’ll explore what we’re doing at cheqd to enable privacy-preserving marketing in a separate post — we would love to share our learnings in this space and hear your thoughts.

Now, what struck us was an organisation working in digital identity that has been shamelessly offering data on their customers to anyone interested in purchasing it.

We were shocked.

Obviously, marketing practices should be ethical across industries, but hearing that from an organisation claiming to address the privacy and data problems makes it double unethical (if such a thing exists).

Living by your mission

And this is a typical example of an organisation having an absolute mismatch between its mission and its actions. I pay particular attention to this as I have an unusual background. I studied environmental science and worked in corporate sustainability for the past ten years, communicating the value of products and services with a purpose (I’m also developing as an artist, but that’s another story).

So ethics of marketing or broader communications practices have always been part of my considerations. But I’m not in any way claiming that it was perfect because, as for the majority of marketers, our holy grail was following the latest best practice (whatever that was in that particular time), which I did too.

Being surrounded by like-minded individuals at cheqd, I finally feel that we can do things differently. The question I want to put out there is whether ethical marketing will always be disadvantageous compared to traditional marketing? Is it going to be limited in its reach and effectiveness and/or be more expensive?

Marketing monopoly

Speaking of the price, there’s a backlash on the social media giants that, simply put, sell your data to advertisers (take Cambridge Analytica or The Social Dilemma). Society rightfully disapproves of these practices. However, this is arguably one of the “most straightforward” and widely used ways to acquire new customers from the marketing perspective (hello, targeted advertising).

I’m not going to argue against or in favour here; my point is of a different nature. This becomes a somewhat monopolistic business — a marketer pretty much ends up with Google/ YouTube, Facebook/ Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn suite. Even if you don’t run pay per click (PPC) campaigns or promote your posts, you’d still most likely rely on collaboration with influencers within those systems. If not the only advertising avenue for some companies, this handful of tech giants, at least, is the major one. And this is concerning.

If you’re to ditch this tech suite for the reasons above, what are you left with?

So, I take you back to my original question — can one truly have ethical marketing — marketing that respects an individual’s personal boundaries? And would it be effective?

In an attempt to answer this question, we’ll explore the legislative developments in the space in our next blog.

In the meantime, do let us know what you think and make sure to join our Telegram community here. We’re also on LinkedIn and Twitter.

How to make digital identity more inclusive and accessible

How to make digital identity more inclusive and accessible-1

The last few months have been fruitful, and we’ve been to a number of events, presenting or participating and learning. As you know, giving back to our community is core to everything we do (hint: we love being invited to events — drop us an email to [email protected]).

Today, we’d like to focus on the Diffusion July 2021 event organised by Outlier Ventures. We discussed making digital identity more inclusive and accessible together with Alex Preukschat, author of Self-Sovereign Identity book, SSI Meetups, Aron van Ammers, CTO & Co-Founder, Outlier Ventures and Evin McMullen, Co-Founder, Serto and Ankur Banerjee, CTO, cheqd. We find this topic of paramount importance, and the tech sector certainly has a long way to go, so we’re grateful to be having this conversation.

Let’s start with a definition of inclusivity and accessibility in the context of digital identity. There are a number of layers of accessibility that could be looked at, including:

1) on a user-level — does it require additional skills? I.e. is it localised? Is it going to work with the hardware you have?

2) on a personal level — is the concept even understood? Can you explain what digital identity means to a friend?

3) underlying tech itself — does it require smartphones only? Could it be widely used across the world?

4) on an operational level — how compatible is it with your existing operational model? Does it require restructuring to use this new tool?

Examples of digital identity use cases

It’s hard to talk about identity without pairing it to a use case. People don’t get up in the morning thinking about digital or self-sovereign identity (SSI), they think they need to fly to X, open a bank account etc., and for that, they need to prove their identity. Usually, you’d think about digital I.D. as a means to achieve the secondary goal.

There are a few examples of digital identity use cases:

  1. Airlines started testing global credentials to verify health passports using SSI and digital identity.
  2. NHS in England rolled out a programme to make it easier for doctors to transfer their credentials across when onboarding within a hospital.
  3. The E.U. green certificate and International Travel Association are doing something similar. Both explore the ways to issue unique digital credentials that individuals can carry on their phones to prove their identity.

Issues related to digital identity accessible and inclusive

The usability aspects don’t get spoken about often within the SSI world partly because this is a very new field, and it’s usually a very technical conversation. Some have been considered in detail as part of the SSI working groups across companies regarding the COVID-19 credentials.

Accessibility and inclusivity are two different terms, though closely interlinked.

On an accessibility level, take a typical example of not having an active internet connection. By default, you have to be connected to the internet as your credentials are on a blockchain — how can you present your credential without an internet connection? We often think this could happen if you’re on border control in a remote place, but often you can be in your office in the city of London with no network coverage.

Another example is not having a smartphone. Put aside a digital divide between the people who own and don’t own one could still affect everybody. Imagine your battery dies, and you can’t charge it? Voila, consider, you don’t have a smartphone anymore.

On an inclusivity front, some of the issues to consider are: how expensive are these systems to use? How easy are these systems to use?

Right now, digital identity is being adopted to its best by early adopters. Even with traditional software, usability and UX have always been a big challenge, putting aside the need to explain how to use this new service. You’ve got to consider various demographics, behaviour preferences, cultural aspects and languages, digital literacy, at last! How easy are these experiences to understand to a broad group of people?

Another aspect to consider is a tricky one — how can you prove that these credentials belong to you? Uber teaches us a good lesson. An Uber driver got approval to conduct commercial activity. However, a different person showed up on a shift. Uber lost its licence after that incident. The point to consider is not about having the right certification but ensuring that it belongs to the rightful owner.

This brings us to the biometric identification issue. Touch ID wouldn’t know if you’re the person you’re claiming to be — all it knows is a fingerprint saved on a device. It could be yours or your family members. Many problems are associated with how “good” biometric algorithms could be for people of colour. Think about how SSI credentials could be linked to biometric identity? It would be quite a powerful mix.

Finally, you can’t have a decentralised web without a decentralised identity. We’re starting to see examples of having decentralised assets in an app but with a centralised identity. This creates inequality risks as individuals should be able to participate not only based on their wallets (wealth they have) but also on their achievements.

Watch how to make digital identity more accessible and inclusive panel discussion:

How to make digital identity accessible and inclusive

There is always a tendency to quickly bring a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to the market and think about accessibility and inclusivity later. But that is wrong — accessibility and inclusivity should be a core part of your product, so think of them early on.

Often owning a smartphone is accessed from a digital divide perspective. So developers tend to assume if they target a particular demographic with a certain amount of wealth, they would own one by default. That assumption is fundamentally wrong. Even those who have the luxury of owning a smartphone can be in a situation with no devices available at hand.

Similarly, when we think about digital literacy, we tend to assume this applies to someone illiterate. However, this applies to most demographics.

An excellent example of how an internet connection issue is resolved is a national Health Service (NHS) Vaccination app. It doesn’t only issue a vaccinated person a Q.R. code, but also you can download a PDF certificate, which you can use with no internet connection.

Finally, to make it accessible and inclusive, at some point, we have to stop using the term SSI, and the language must become easier, so a 5-year old can understand.

The bottom line is to make digital identity accessible 1) it should be fully decentralised and 2) the use of digital identity should be as easy as showing a scanned PDF, and 3) it should be available to all.

cheq out the second part, where we discuss the key takeaways from The Internet Identity Workshop. We explore how to make SSI relevant to all and why we need to move away from SSI to authentic. Finally, we delve into how SSI should be adopted globally.

In the meantime, join our rapidly growing Twitter community here to stay updated with our latest news as we head towards launch.

P.S. We’re also on Telegram or LinkedIn; make sure to cheq in!