cheqd’s 2022 Highlights

cheqd 2022 highlights

What a year it’s been! We thought 2021 was smashing, but hey, we should have seen what’s in store for 2022. Incredibly proud of the cheqd team and our amazing community for all we achieved this year 😍 Without further ado, here are our 2022 highlights.

2022 achievements & highlights

Brand awareness

From North to South America and across Europe, we’ve presented at 14 conferences, including Web Summit, Money 20/20, Cosmoverse, European Identity and Cloud Conference, and Internet Identity Workshop and attended over 20! We’ve also held over 40 AMAs!

Over 70 publications worldwide have mentioned cheqd or interviewed us directly, including The Sunday Times, Bloomberg, Cointelegraph (three times!), Bitcoinist, Benzinga, Currency.com and many others. We certainly got a chunk of our well-deserved publicity this year!

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Reflecting on a year of product development

At the start of the year, we laid out an ambitious Product Vision focused on building the foundations for our vision of an interoperable network to enable portable, verifiable and private digital credentials, with the payments rails to follow.

On the network side, we have come on a long way since the launch of the network in November 2021, introducing the core feature of identity infrastructure, DIDs, at the start of the year, followed by our innovative Resource module enabling DID-Linked-Resources which is creating waves in the SSI / #IDTech space. We’re also wrapping up the year with the introduction of identity transaction pricing to our testnet, detailed in our tokenomics v4. This will come into effect on mainnet in January of next year.

In terms of apps & SDKs which enable partners to interact with the network, what we call the ‘cheqd Toolbox’, we’ve achieved our goals and some. We successfully built out a working Javascript-based SDK, the Veramo SDK for cheqd, which offers end-to-end functionality for developers to build their identity applications. We have also made significant progress with integration into Walt ID’s SSI Kit, and our partners Animo Solutions are building cheqd support into Aries Framework JavaScript. We have already successfully demoed cheqd using AnonCreds through Aries Framework JavaScript alongside our partners Animo Solutions, and full SDK support is due to be completed following some updates to the Hyperledger AnonCreds spec to decouple dependencies on Hyperledger Indy.

If you’re looking to deep-dive into our product development, cheq out our 2022 Product Reflections blog, which offers an in-depth analysis of our progress, transparently measuring our success against vision and providing useful reflections for other projects in identity & Cosmos.

Partnerships

  • Secured 42 SSI partners representing >65% of known SSI vendor market out benchmarking competitors.
  • Secured 22 Web3 validators and over 55 mainnet validators.
  • Secured multiple partnerships in Web3: Metavisa, Leap wallet, and others.
  • In multiple late-stage talks with major corporations in the consumer credit vertical for a flagship use case to launch trusted data markets.

Bringing cheqd Network to life through product demos

Bringing infrastructure to life is not an easy feat; however, this year, we’ve found innovative ways, both within cheqd and in collaboration with our identity partners, to make cheqd real. Our wallet.cheqd demo has continuously evolved over 2022, bringing our novel features such as DID-LinkedResources to life, plus bridging the gap between DeFi and SSI, garnering excellent feedback at conferences and events.

We’re also incredibly proud of our partnership with Animo, which enabled an industry first, with the demo of AnonCreds on cheqd using the Aries Framework Javascript SDK – cheqd out a demo here. The support from the cheqd community for this is also a massive highlight, which offered the opportunity to see how the cheqd Community Pool can be used.

In 2023 you can expect demo’s coming to a whole new level, with an opportunity for YOU to really get stuck in with cheqd and HODL in an entirely new way…watch this space!

Cementing the cheqd name in key SSI / IDTech communities

DID-Linked-Resources has been proposed as a formal specification in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Credentials Community Group.

Having successfully decoupled AnonCreds from Hyperledger Indy, cheqd is now helping to rework the Hyperledger AnonCreds specification into something fully ledger-agnostic.

This year Ankur attended a number of the leading Identity conferences, including 2 x Internet Identity Workshops and Rebooting Web of Trust, presenting his paper on what we can learn from the world of sports, Tinder, and Netflix. In each, he’s been noticed as a powerful voice in the space, offering leadership around interoperability, scalability and how to collaborate for the success of the space. He’s also been consistent with great tweetstorms (which we all love), which have received a lot of traction.

Alex, as ever, has been contributing to ToIP phenomenally:

Ross, Product Manager & Operations Lead, has also recently been named Co-Chair of DIF #Product-Managers. He’ll be publishing a blog about his plans for the community in the New Year, plus inviting Product Managers from across the identity space to a series of workshops, so watch this space and contact Ross if you’d like to get involved!

Community growth

Updated tokenomics

Our tokenomics updates include a community pool parameter increase, and we are proposing to introduce two new mechanisms to the cheqd tokenomics; identity transaction pricing and burns. These measures will improve the tokenomic sustainability of the cheqd network.

Social time!

Had some great fun both virtually and in-person over the year, with numerous escape rooms, in-person meetups and quarterly retrospectives, which give us the opportunity to come together and reflect.

The wider Web3 (Web5) & identity landscape

From a wider market perspective, despite the crypto winter, this year has seen a number of decentralised initiatives going live. With Jack Dorsey’s announcement of Web5 right after Vitalik Buterin’s introduction of the soulbound tokens (SBTs), the decentralised web has been buzzing and making waves in the mainstream media. Although these are two separate announcements, both have driven considerable attention to the decentralised digital identity technology. No wonder why search for self-sovereign identity has seen a massive growth of over +1433%. Finally, with a growing number of identity thefts and cyber attacks, i.e. Revolut, a need for safe and privacy-preserving decentralised identity solutions hasn’t been more timely. We remain strong with our funds safely secured, taking our solutions far and wide and marking 2023 as a year of adoption.

Looking to the year ahead

To make decentralised identity adoption a reality, we have a solid plan. Starting with the payment rails architecture, we are working with our fantastic partners to make them live soon. This is the final piece of the cheqd solution to help both cheqd and SSI see adoption grow!

We’re already looking at key use cases which we think will generate the first adoption of payments and commercial models for SSI, creating entirely new business models and opportunities for companies and individuals.

Speaking of the adoption, there is going to be a groundbreaking project, bridging the Web2 paradigm into Web3! This will create entirely new business models for companies and consumers.

Finally, there is an exciting and novel project that will help bring cheqd infrastructure to life for our partners and communities alike. Expect the opportunity to get something in your own hands sometime in the new year (we’ll say no more 😁).

Happy holidays from the cheqd team! Thank you for being with us and sharing our mission of building a marketplace for trusted data. ♥️

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 expands partnership network with leading self-sovereign identity vendors

SSI vendors 2-1

London, 4th May 2022 – cheqd, a market-leading solution enabling individuals and organisations to take control of their data has expanded its partnership network to a total of 35 top self-sovereign identity (SSI) vendors, after announcing its second SSI cohort.

SSI or decentralised identity is an emerging disruptive technology for exchanging trusted (also referred to as authentic) data, between people and companies in a more secure manner, giving entities ownership and control over their own data. According to a meta-analysis by cheqd published on Bloomberg, the SSI market is projected to be worth over US$550 billion, which demonstrates the significant opportunity the technology poses.   

cheqd’s network is primarily built for SSI vendors to disrupt established identity paradigms and create new authentic data marketplaces. Each SSI vendor will utilise cheqd’s network tooling, functionality and native token, $CHEQ, for payment rails, never-seen-before commercial models and decentralised governance to advance their commercial strategies and technical roadmaps. The scale of distribution in the SSI space is unmatched – through its strong community of partners, cheqd engages with companies in various different industries, which further demonstrates the endless areas of opportunity for the application of SSI technology. 

The new SSI companies joining cheqd’s network are as follows:

Animo Solutions: https://animo.id/

Animo Solutions works with developers and organisations to improve digital interaction using verifiable credentials. They create solutions where exchanging data is privacy-preserving and frictionless. Timo Glastra, co-founder of Animo Solutions, comments on building scalable SSI solutions on cheqd to handle the huge forthcoming growth in SSI:

“At Animo we build open-source digital identity infrastructure. Through our customers, we’ve experienced the need for a scalable network that is specifically suited to SSI implementation. We’re using cheqd to build SSI solutions that can handle the huge growth that is coming in the field.”

 

ID Lynx: https://idlynx.com/

ID Lynx connects and empowers a global community that provides decentralised digital identity solution platforms for individuals, organisations, animals and IoT devices. Chris Raczkowski, CEO of ID Lynx, comments:

“By joining the cheqd network we’re looking forward to utilising the network’s core utility to support our existing customer use-cases and explore cheqd’s payment rails for SSI to bring entirely new use-cases and revenue streams to our business. We are also excited to join the partnership network and cooperate with diverse partners to fast-track not just our own growth, but also accelerate the global adoption of SSI – a long-held ambition of mine and our ID Lynx team.”

 

Gravity: https://www.gravity.earth/

Gravity believes in data sharing for anyone, anywhere and has created products where individuals and organisations can create and manage portable and verifiable digital identities, issue and share credentials securely and easily verify and authenticate users. Johannes Ebert, CEO of Gravity, explains why joining cheqd is critical to their business:

“For companies like us, focusing on building applications based on SSI that enable users to access services, the payment rail component is critical in ensuring that we offer customers a seamless payment experience. Gravity’s business model is based on “pay per data”, such that customers pay for the data exchanged based on the number of credentials and the types of claims contained within them. Leveraging cheqd’s payment rail infrastructure is therefore vital for Gravity as our customer base expands and the number of credential exchanges grows.” 

 

AyanWorks: https://www.ayanworks.com/  

AyanWorks builds the foundations of SSI for individuals, enterprises, applications, and devices based on open standards. CEO of AyanWorks, Kalyan Kulkarni, comments on how cheqd’s incentivisation of verifiable credentials could lead to widespread adoption:

“AyanWorks is a fast-growing Blockchain Tech consulting company with a focus on decentralised identity and verifiable credentials. We share the vision of ‘identity for all’ by means of bringing solutions that emphasise privacy by design and privacy by default. We are keen to see how incentivising the verifiable credentials that cheqd is evangelising, can contribute to the adoption of this technology and are excited to have joined this network to leverage it and accelerate SSI solutions.”

 

Gayadeed: https://www.gayadeed.it/it/ 

Gayadeed is an application that helps companies and professionals to securely sign agreements instantly from anywhere in the world. Co-founder of Gayadeed, Egidio Casati, sees cheqd as a crucial evolution in incentivised networks to bridge traditional eIDAS trust services:

“As a smart agreement platform, we are committed to bridge traditional eIDAS trust services with SSI protocols, focusing on interoperability, sustainability and UIX. We fully embrace cheqd’s crucial evolution towards a sustainable, properly incentivised and interoperable SSI ecosystem and we are glad to join the network to build and deliver SSI-powered applications ready for mass adoption.”

 

Monokee: https://monokee.com/

Monokee permits organisations to manage identities and embrace the new identity paradigm of SSI, where people and companies take control of their digital identity. Roberto Griggio, CEO of Monokee comments on the cheqd partnership:

“Monokee is a technology enabler that integrates identity management with disruptive and decentralised technologies to provide enterprise-grade security and compliance. Thanks to the partnership with cheqd, Monokee aims at establishing a virtuous cycle where verifiable credentials and distributed ledgers can sustain themselves, through cheqd’s payment rails, network utility and commitment to interoperability and open standards.”

 

Umazi: https://www.umazi.io/

Umazi are pioneers of global cross-industry due diligence and one of the most exciting start-ups in the space. Co-founder and CEO Cindy van Nierkirk on the collaboration with cheqd to increase revenue on all sides of the trust triangle: 

“Umazi is carving out a new market to enable continuous enterprise identity verification for business due diligence. We’re ready to explore the utility of cheqd’s payment rails to incentivise users of our due diligence trust network. This collaborative partnership will allow both of us to grow the next level of revenue generation across all sides of the trust triangle using cheqd’s Web3 SSI technology.”

 

Soverio: https://soverio.com/

Soverio is committed to helping our clients improve their online business security, implement digital transformation, and boost operational efficiency with the help of innovative technologies like Decentralised Identity and Verifiable Credentials. Audrius Ramoska, Soverio CEO and co-founder, shares on cheqd providing the missing payment rails for Soverio’s customers:

“As the physical and digital worlds merge, finding secure and trusted ways of verifying the identity or securely exchanging data is becoming essential. Our new partnership with cheqd enables new possibilities for our Soverio customers, not only in a traditional business environment as we know it now but in the near future too (CeDeFi, Web3, Metaverse, CBDC, SSI, etc.). cheqd’s payment rails for SSI are what we missed in our portfolio.”

 

Verio: https://verio.id/

Verio is a full-stack verifiable credential platform and digital wallet with use-cases ranging from user authentication, customer onboarding to complex multi-party interactions. Cristian Talle, Verio CEO, notes on the cheqd partnership:

“Verio is proud to join the cheqd network to bring payment utility to our verifiable credentials, a much needed innovation in the SSI space. We’re also excited to leverage cheqd’s network, which we can utilise for our customers, partners and to enter new verticals to expand our business.”

 

Mavennet: https://www.mavennet.com/

Mavennet, creators of leading trusted-data exchange platforms, builds and launches blockchain-enabled SSI products, with a focus on large enterprise implementations. Yevgen Malyshev, Chief Product Officer, expands on working with cheqd to create new business models around verifiable credentials:

“Mavennet is excited to join the cheqd network for digital credentials and self-sovereign identity. Mavennet builds enterprise digital products with blockchain at its core. Therefore, we’re particularly pleased to also become part of the partnership network and work with cheqd to bring applications and services to new customers in the verticals we serve as well as create new business models around verifiable credentials.”

 

Tobias Halloran, cheqd’s Head of Partnerships, adds: 

“We’re excited to announce our second cohort of self-sovereign identity vendors, bringing our total to 35 strong partners, who will build with us, develop cheqd’s ecosystem and enter new partnership models to augment growth for their businesses. Each cheqd partner is as valuable to us as the next, and we look forward to scaling with our SSI vendors through our cheqd’s partnership network, and building their businesses through leveraging the network’s core utility.”

To join cheqd’s network please email: [email protected] or [email protected]

For enquiries, please contact:

Alexandra Santos, Associate Partner

[email protected] 

Happy birthday, cheqd! Year in review

happy bday cheqd blog

Co-authored by Fraser Edwards and Ankur Banerjee

It’s now just over a year since we started work on cheqd (or verim as we were first called), which feels like both the shortest and longest year of our lives, certainly the most exciting! Since it’s our first anniversary, we decided to give you a rundown of our first year and share a glimpse into our plans – as always a huge thanks to our community that has been part of this incredible journey!

Pre-genesis (< November 2022)

Post-genesis (> November 2022)

Obviously, the first two items here have to be the following:

Since then, we have been on board a rocket ship! There are so many things to cover, we’ve had to break them out into sections, or the next bit would just be a wall of hyped bullet points:

  • Partnerships (inc. exchanges)
  • Tech / Product (inc. decentralisation)
  • Marketing and Community

Partnerships (incl. exchanges)

EXCHANGES

Just four months on from mainnet launch we are now listed on two centralised exchanges  (Gate.io and Bitmart), two decentralised exchanges (Osmosis and Uniswap) and a fiat on-ramp (Indacoin), so averaging an exchange a month.

  • The key part is providing easy access to the token to allow anyone to begin building as we extend the network utility.
  • Indacoin are especially relevant as they allow anyone with a credit or debit card to access the network without complex service agreements or contracts.
Screenshot 2022-04-21 at 16.26.30

OTHER PARTNERSHIPS

  • SSI: Now working with over 32 market-leading SSI vendors, including esatus, Spherity, Danube Tech, Northern Block, Serto, DIDx, Tykn, Randa Solutions, truu, Anonyome Labs, Domi Labs, Evernym in our first cohort; and, Mavennet, ID Lynx, Umazi, Gravity, Animo Solutions, AyanWorks, Verio, Soverio, Monokee, SecureKey, Gayadeed in our second SSI cohort.
  • Validators: Partnered with top Cosmos validators, including Everstake, Citadel.One, Forbole, Notional, Informal Systems, WhisperNode, Lavender.Five, Enigma, Smartnodes and many more.
  • Consultancies: Signed multiple partnership agreements with consultancies, including 51Nodes, Chainstep and more to be announced with large global consultancies.
  • Global Expansion and Consortia: Signed partnerships with experts and large consortia across the globe, including Data Sharing Coalition in the Netherlands and Australian Data Exchange in Australia.
  • Cross-chain partnerships: MetaVisa, Kado, Avarta & Nethermind in preparation to expand with our SSI partners with new web3 SSI applications.
Screenshot 2022-04-28 at 09.12.07

Tech/ Product (incl. decentralisation)

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A recap of cheqd’s product roadmap priorities for Q1 2022

  • cheqd demo wallet: Inside the next few weeks, we will have a basic wallet for holding W3C Verifiable Credentials as well as tokens, specifically for demo purposes, which can then be expanded upon by ourselves and our partners in bringing end-customers to the network.
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  • Payment Rails: Published the tokenomics for the payment rails, which we’ll be building out over the coming months.
  • ERC-20 token: Partnered with Gravity Bridge to create an ERC20 representation of the Cosmos-based CHEQ token
  • Commits: Been featured on the most number of commits (top five Crypto wide) for the development team across the entire web3 ecosystem!
  • Upgrades: We have upgraded the network twice already. This has included some major improvements to the identity functionality of the network, now hardened and ready for the team to further expand the utility of the network at pace.
  • Documentation: we’re making it as easy as possible to learn more about SSI, decentralised identity and our place in this at cheqd through our new learning site on learn.cheqd.io for validators and the community.
  • Research: Completed an extensive survey of our partners and the entire community, following which we published two detailed pieces of analysis. Firstly, the ​​Top 5 trends in Decentralised Self-Sovereign Identity and Privacy-preserving Technology in Web 3.0, based on a survey of general audiences and experts in the field of self-sovereign identity. Secondly, a more technical piece Understanding the SSI Stack through 5 Trends and Challenges, based on an expert audience of self-sovereign identity vendors and enthusiasts.
  • Infrastructure: We’ve also continued to make choices critical to the long-term sustainability of the network and ease of use, building out DevOps automations to streamline setting up a node, managing a node, and migrating from AWS to a blend of Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and Cloudflare.
  • DIDs: Successfully published the first DID on cheqd mainnet using the cheqd DID method (announcement coming soon!). Refactored the Indy DID method into a W3C compliant format, with DID Docs, options for multiple DID Controllers and more complex Verification Relationships. Built two DID resolvers (main and proxy) for resolving DIDs on cheqd easily.
  • Verifiable Credentials: Utilised an existing SDK to issue our first Verifiable Credential, signed by a cheqd DID. Working on the implementation of Credential schemas with their own DID and DID Document to enable compatibility with AnonCreds. Expanding Hyperledger Aries based SDKs to expand their scope beyond Hyperledger Indy. Packaging all of this into a digestible unified SDK for all our partners to work with.
  • Carbon Neutral: Joined the Cosmos ZERO Carbon Commitment, led by Regen Network – an open-source working framework for carbon footprint calculations for Cosmos Blockchains – to offset our carbon footprint.
Here’s a peek at what’s next – find out more in our full blog here.

cheqd featured in top crypto project daily codebase commits

DECENTRALISATION

The concept of Entropy was created by the team at cheqd to model how the control of the network changes over time, from the initial launch where the core team had greater control (Low Entropy), to a state where the community and users of the network have full control over the network (High Entropy).

We also created a scorecard and model for measuring Entropy.

So, where are we now?

Entropy change

Comparing this to where we started at cheqd mainnet launch, we have decentralised in almost all categories, improving from a score of 9 to a score of 20, out of a possible total of 35. This is a dramatic shift but there is still plenty of improvement remaining, specifically on the number of governance proposals and codebase commits successfully submitted from outside the core team.

Marketing & Community

Our marketing team mainly focused on two areas, content and community building. We’re happy to see that our content got us published in fantastic media outlets, allowed us to get our website pages ranking high on internet searches, and educated many people who haven’t heard about SSI before.

We’re honoured to have loyal and engaged members who have been part of our journey and have seen this amazing growth! Here are some of our highlights:

  • Built an incredible community of over 50 thousand members, including developers and node operators
  • Published 52 blog posts and one whitepaper ‘Self-Sovereign Identity – How big is the market opportunity?‘
  • Got >150 media coverage including Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Benzinga, Market Watch, Bitcoinist and more!
cheqd press collage
  • Uploaded >20 videos
  • Successfully completed our Cosmos Community Rewards, with cheqd growing the number of wallets from 6,000 to 71,000+. This also took our community engagement to new levels with 21,000+ Telegram group members, 48,000+ Twitter followers, and nearly 10,000+ Discord users!
cheqd socials
  • Participated in >five podcasts
  • Organised two memes competitions (and more to come, stay tuned)
  • Attended three conferences/events in person (more to come as events start to open up again)
  • Organised two giveaway contests

Moving forward

  • Building out the identity functionality to the latest standards as they emerge so we will always be at the forefront.
  • Building out payment functionality so the network effects of SSI can be turbocharged by revenue generation and cost-saving.
  • Establishing partnerships with Web3.0 projects to create new utilities including:
    • KYCd but anonymous liquidity pools or collateralised loans
    • p2p transfers with trust, i.e. no more test transfers
    • Proper NFT provenance and ownership
    • Decentralised reputation systems for identity proofing, i.e. legitimate influencer or exchange representative vs a scammer
    • Launching a self-serve decentralised partnership network
  • Progressing our burgeoning partnerships across custodians, exchanges and compliance providers so that we can present an end-to-end solution for enterprises where they don’t need to worry about crypto.

Keep up with our work – follow us on Twitter and Telegram!

Q1 round-up from cheqd: We’ve upgraded our network’s identity features, bridged to Ethereum, plus much more…

Co-authored by Fraser Edwards (CEO/co-founder), Ankur Banerjee (CTO/co-founder), Alex Tweeddale (Governance & Compliance Lead), and Ross Power (Product Manager)

cheqd is moving fast as we build out the decentralised network for trusted data on Cosmos. Three months into 2022, and we’ve been blowing past our quarterly milestones: making headway in the identity features of the network, bridging to Ethereum, listing on more high-profile cryptoasset exchanges, improving the validator and token holder experience, and much more.

A recap of cheqd’s product roadmap priorities for Q1 2022

At the start of the year, we shared cheqd’s product vision for 2022 where we laid out our plans for the year ahead, beginning with some ‘quick wins’ across identity and Web 3.0. In this blog post, we’ll give a summary of what we achieved in Q1 — and what to look forward to beyond.

Top 10 Highlights from Q1 for cheqd

  1. Completed two successful upgrades of the network. This is a large step in the right direction to firm up the identity capabilities of the network as we prepare to move into Q2, which will bring with it some exciting ways to make it easier for anyone to interact with the identity functionalities.
  2. Created a CHEQ-ERC20 wrapped token using Gravity Bridge. This means you can now engage in Liquidity Pools on Ethereum based DEX’s such as UniSwap! The Cosmos-based CHEQ token was already available on Osmosis DEX and was also listed on Emeris DEX.
  3. Welcomed some of the major validators in Cosmos ecosystem onboard as trusted partners: Everstake, Informal systems, Citadel.One, Forbole, Notional, WhisperNode, Smartnodes, Enigma, EZstaking, Blockfend and Lavender.Five Nodes.
  4. Welcomed our second cohort of SSI vendors: Animo Solutions, Gravity, Mavennet, AyanWorks, Umazi, Monokee, Gaya, Verio (and 5 more to be announced shortly).
  5. Been showered with press love — from Bloomberg to The FinTech Times, and from Global Banking and Finance Review to Blockchain Tribune, Bitcoinist, and many more!
  6. Successfully completed our Cosmos Community Rewards, with cheqd growing the number of wallets from 6,000 to 71,000+. This also took our community engagement to new levels with 23,000+ Telegram group members, 47,000+ Twitter followers, and 10,000+ Discord users.
  7. Listed on BitMart, a premier global digital asset trading platform with more than nine million users worldwide and ranked among the top crypto exchanges on CoinGecko.
  8. Formed a strategic partnership with Indacoin — a leading fiat-to-crypto exchange company — to allow people to buy $CHEQ tokens more easily and drive mass adoption. Millions of credit and debit cardholders are now able to purchase $CHEQ in more than 180 countries to accelerate the adoption of SSI.
  9. Published our analysis of the Top 5 trends in Decentralised Self-Sovereign Identity and Privacy-preserving Technology in Web 3.0, based on a survey of general audiences and experts in the field of self-sovereign identity.
  10. Made it easier to engage in governance voting and discussions through the integration with Commonwealth

More ways to engage and interact with cheqd

In Q2 2022, we aim to bring more ways to interact with cheqd: both on the $CHEQ token, as well as identity functionality. Let’s dive in…

Update on product roadmap progress

✅ Our upgraded cheqd mainnet

The cheqd mainnet upgrade in March 2022 was a major step for us as we wrapped up much of the improvements to the identity aspects of the network we needed to do. This upgrade fixed technical debt issues and overall offered significant enhancements to the identity functionality and security of the network. You’ll find a more in-depth explanation of the March upgrade further in a separate blog post as well as our release notes for cheqd node v0.5.0.

📚 Improved documentation for validators and community

Last week we launched our new learning site on learn.cheqd.io. We believe it is vital that we play our part in improving knowledge of what the possibilities are with the cheqd network and generally about self-sovereign identity. This new site will act as a central location for all things decentralised identity, SSI and Web 3.0, as we draw on our existing knowledge and new discoveries to help educate our community members and partners alike.

We’ve updated the documentation for cheqd node software. Many of our SSI partners and other validators noted in our product roadmap survey that more clarity is needed in our documentation, and improvements made to the overall onboarding experience.

We have made improvements in the node installation and upgrade process through Debian packages as well as Docker images. We also created snapshots.cheqd.net to serve up daily ledger snapshots to speed up the setup/restore process for node operators.

We hope these improvements will reduce the time it takes to set up a node, reduce the need to seek support, and free up more of our engineering team’s time for building functionality on the network.

CHEQ-ERC20 wrapped token using Gravity Bridge

As we build payment rails for trusted data, we want to offer issuers, verifiers (the receivers of trusted data), and holders a choice on the means of settlement. We expect a preference for stablecoins to eliminate the volatility in either pricing or settling payments for trusted data. More on this in our tokenomics for payment models. Building a link to Ethereum was one of the most heavily requested Web 3.0 features/functionality that the cheqd community wanted in our product survey.

A blockchain bridge or ‘cross-chain bridge’ enables users to transfer assets or any form of data seamlessly from one entirely separate protocol or ecosystem to another (i.e. Solana to Ethereum, or in our case Cosmos to Ethereum and vice versa).

CHEQ-ERC20:USDT pool on Uniswap

Therefore, we partnered with Gravity Bridge to create an ERC20 representation of the Cosmos-based CHEQ token. You can transfer CHEQ between its Cosmos and ERC20 versions now using the SpaceStation InterChain Bridge web app and participate in liquidity pools on Uniswap. This brings the CHEQ token to even more DEXs, besides Osmosis DEX.

You can add the CHEQ-ERC20 token to MetaMask by clicking on More under the profile summary, and then Add Token to MetaMask (Web 3).

📖 Tutorials for identity functionality on cheqd network

Making cheqd’s functionality easily digestible and accessible has been a core goal for the team in this quarter. This one is the top-ranked feedback point from our network partners.

In the background, we have been working on multiple tutorials for creating Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and DID Documents using the cheqd node command-line interface (CLI) as well as Evernym Verifiable Data Registry (VDR) Tools. Stay tuned for more on this soon 🤓

🛠 Migrating cheqd’s testnet from AWS, with more DevOps automation

We initially ran most of cheqd’s own mainnet and testnet nodes on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but over the series of months we’ve been running the network, we identified a number of fundamental issues that make AWS not commercially competitive for running nodes at the scale we need to do our infrastructure. (Perhaps worth its own blog post.)

Our mainnet currently runs on a blend of Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and Cloudflare — and we’ve now completed this transition for our testnet as well. We’ve also worked on completely refactoring our repositories for DevOps and cloud automation tooling, which we plan on open-sourcing.

💳 Simpler ways to buy $CHEQ, through Indacoin

Easy access to $CHEQ has been a major priority for the team here, and we are happy to announce that buying $CHEQ is now a simple process, with just a debit or credit card.

This is made possible through our integration with Indacoin, which currently allows highly efficient on-ramps into cheqd and other large crypto projects. Indacoin is also currently working on developing similarly efficient off-ramps which will genuinely revolutionise how cryptocurrency is accessed, bought and sold. No complex, onerous and time-consuming commercial agreements to negotiate. 

🪂 Airdrops for the Cosmos community

We ran a series of community rewards (“airdrops”) for the Cosmos community. Airdrops are a common method used to reward community members who engage in various activities such as staking CHEQ tokens, or other networks selected, providing Liquidity on pools and generally for being loyal and engaged supporters. Check out if your wallet is eligible on rewards.cheqd.io, which will allow you to claim $CHEQ token rewards.

Out of the Cosmos ecosystem wallets we calculated eligibility for, approximately 180,000 wallets are entirely new to cheqd: as in, they weren’t staking or LPing $CHEQ before our campaigns began. The cheqd airdrop helped us achieve a number of milestones in our overall presence, and significantly increased the amount of cheqd wallets, now at 71,000+ unique cheqd wallets. We welcome these Cosmonauts from the Cosmos ecosystem onboard!

However, the airdrop was not without its difficulties and has offered us an interesting insight into more of the challenges that exist within Web 3.0 which largely come down to issues relating to identity. Across the airdrop, we were able to identify a significant amount of fraudulent behaviour based on sockpuppeting. At the same time, we made omissions that initially resulted in far lower wallets being calculated as eligible than they should have been.

We sincerely apologise to the Cosmos and cheqd community for this error and hope to make future airdrop campaigns go smoother based on the lessons learned from this one.

We do have a final airdrop mission coming soon, so watch this space… oh, and Happy Easter 😉🥚🐇

Also check out…

👉 cheqd’s meta-analysis reasoning that the self-sovereign digital identity market size could be worth $500 billion+ 🔖 Our survey-based analysis on the Top 5 trends in Decentralised Self-Sovereign Identity and Privacy-preserving Technology in Web 3.0

🔮 Looking forward: Q2 and beyond…

Over the coming months, we’re continuing to work on key identity aspects of the network, largely improving the overall developer/user experience and making the identity functionality come to life.

Q2 and beyond product roadmap for cheq

🔍 Universal DID Resolver

We are in the final stages of wrapping up the design and architecture for a Universal Resolver driver for the did:cheqd method. While there are REST APIs on the node/ledger software to produce the underlying data for DID and its associated DIDDoc, the JSON produced by the default REST API cannot be fully conformant to the DID Core spec because of limitations in the conversion from on-ledger to JSON format.

This DID Resolver that we’re building will enhance data fetched from ledger to provide DID Core specification conformant JSON DIDDoc production. The objective is to provide two distinct modes of running DID resolution, to meet the needs of different developer audiences.

  1. “Full” DID Resolver that directly talks to a ledger node. This will likely be required by app developers or SSI vendors looking at processing high volumes of requests, and/or if they want the highest levels of assurance that the data was pulled untampered from the ledger.
  2. “Light” DID Resolver, designed as a serverless application that relays requests to a remote/external “full” DID Resolver API. This will allow app developers who don’t want to run a full node + full DID Resolver to be able to run their own, extremely scalable, and lightweight infrastructure for servicing DID read requests.

🧑‍💻 Client-application SDKs

Software Development Kits (SDKs) are important for providing third parties functionality to use cheqd. Within an SDK for a network such as cheqd’s, it is important to provide easy functionality to (among other things):

  • Creating, updating, retrieving DIDs and associated DID Documents
  • Issuing, holding, verifying, and revoking Verifiable Credentials
  • Creating, updating, and reading schemas for Verifiable Credentials

Our aim is to make a single, modular SDK that supports the cheqd DID method while offering compatibility with Hyperledger Aries-based SDKs such as Aries Framework JavaScript.

🗃 A web-based wallet for $CHEQ tokens… and credentials

A common question we get from our SSI vendor/partners as well as from our community is a simple way to visualise and understand the token + identity functionality that our network offers. We want to bring together the work we are doing on DID Resolvers and client-app SDKs into a web-based app that allows people to engage with CHEQ tokens, as well as to hold digital credentials.

We see this as a way to demonstrate how the various parts of the tech stack fit together, and to provide a reference implementation that can be used by our SSI vendor-partners. To be clear, we do not want to directly compete with the existing rich ecosystem of wallets and credential-handling applications — but create simple user experiences, focused on Web 3.0 use cases, that were ranked highly in our SSI trends research.

🧾 Scalable revocation registries and payment rails

cheqd’s USP is that it provides a way for Verifiable Credentials to be monetised using its native token, $CHEQ. There are various commercial models that may be created by using the cheqd network.
An example payment flow for digital credential exchanges

A verifier could pay the issuer for Verifiable Credentials it receives from the holder. This gives the issuer a recurring revenue stream each time the Credentials it issues need to be live-checked by the issuer.

The mechanism for this payment is through a privacy-preserving revocation registry that the issuer establishes.

The verifier will make a payment only if it wants to check whether the holder’s credentials have been revoked or not.

Over the next quarter, we will begin to fully define the Revocation Registry architecture and the building blocks for payment rails.

Conclusion

It’s been a very busy start to the year for the team and we’ve achieved a lot of our objectives and key results in the first quarter of 2022. This provides a fantastic foundation for the rest of the year, and to continue building our vision of becoming the payment layer for self-sovereign identity ecosystems.

Alongside our partners, we want to showcase what cheqd can really do to affect the way we interact online and offline — adding a trust layer — and incentive mechanisms.

We’d finally like to give a big shout out to our community of node operators, and the ever-growing community of supporters who motivate us to keep achieving new heights as we build on our vision.

Keep it up cheqmates — and we will continue to work with your best interests at heart! ❤️

We would love to know your thoughts as always either as comments on the article or via any of our other channels below.

Make sure to join our rapidly growing Telegram community to stay updated with our most recent news and insights.

P.S. We’re also on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Discord make sure to cheq in!

BitMart to List CHEQ, Native Token for the cheqd network

BitMart listing cheqd-1

BitMart, the premier global digital asset trading platform, will list the CHEQ token (CHEQ) on April 4, 2022, and the CHEQ/USDT trading pair will be available at 11:00 AM (EDT).

cheqd is a market-leading solution enabling individuals and organizations to take control of their data.

$CHEQ is the token governing the cheqd network that allows issuers/receivers/holders/node operators to pay each other for digital credentials without compromising the privacy and security of users.

The platform delivers first-of-its-kind payment rails, customizable commercial models, and governance structures for trusted* (also referred to as authentic) data, including self-sovereign identity (SSI). SSI is a user-centric methodology for exchanging trusted data more securely. It is also widely believed to be the next generation of digital identities across open networks.

BitMart is thrilled to add the CHEQ token cheqd network ($CHEQ) to our portfolio of offerings. We are excited by the promise of a secure network that enables individuals and organizations to take complete control of their data and allows anyone to verify identities quickly and securely.

About BitMart

BitMart Exchange is the premier global digital assets trading platform with more than nine million users worldwide and ranked among the top crypto exchanges on CoinGecko. Currently offering 850+ trading pairs with one of the lowest trading fees in the industry, we are a constantly evolving and growing platform. To learn more about BitMart, visit our website, follow our Twitter, or join our Telegram for updates, news, and promotions. Make sure to download the BitMart App to easily trade your favorite crypto anytime, anywhere.

cheqd partners with Australian Data Exchange to accelerate new business models for Verifiable Credentials

Australian Data Exchange cheqd

cheqd is delighted to announce a partnership with ID Exchange, trading as Australian Data Exchange (ADX), which will support cheqd’s expansion into the Australian and Pacific (APAC) region as a local expert in digital identity, with an excellent network, and a first-in-class range of supported technologies and software focussed on user-controlled data and consent management. 

Joanne Cooper, Australian Data Exchange CEO, has stated the following:

“Australian Data Exchange has an appetite to bring together world leading technology approaches, integrated or standalone, to offer Government and Enterprise seamless data exchange services necessary to onboard new decentralised models to enable elements of Data Utility, Privacy, Consent, AI and Verifiable Credentials in a powerful customer centric manner. 

Working together with cheqd, we can begin to piece together an entire digital identity and data sharing ecosystem – from infrastructure layer, to data exchange layer, to customer consent management.”

This latest partnership between cheqd also leverages ADX’s A/NZ agency with digi.me, a leading business to business to consumer (B2B2C) personal data grid platform, designed to maximise decentralised aggregation and interoperability offering mobility with data agency actioned via the consumer.  Digi.me enables individuals to control and consent to when their personal data is used, and have direct management over their GDPR data subject rights as a default setting. 

Cooper continues, “the digi.me product fits fantastically into the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) stack on top of cheqd, as a specialised identity agent and data sharing intermediary, as defined by the latest European Data Governance Act. 

We are impressed with cheqd’s professionalism and extensive partnership network and look forward to collaborating on joint and seamless solutions for enterprises and governments going forward.”

Alex Tweeddale, cheqd’s Product Manager and Governance Lead, currently residing in Australia, concludes: 

“It has been excellent to work with ADX so far; they possess an expert level of knowledge on emerging identity technologies, including SSI, on top of an extensive contact list of industry connections in the APAC region. 

cheqd looks forward to helping expand the uptake of decentralised identity into APAC, and by working together with ADX, we can really begin to piece together a full technical stack for a user-centric, interoperable, commercially viable identity ecosystem.” 

Ends

image2

About Australian Data Exchange & ID Exchange

Australian Data Exchange is a brand and Australian Business Name registered and operated by ID Exchange Pty. Limited. 

The brand has been designed to accommodate comprehensive data exchange services in the Australian marketplace with the aim to assist Australian Government and Business to leverage enabling technologies designed to underpin the emerging personal data economy.

CEO Joanne Cooper is a 2020 Telstra Businesswoman of the Year Finalist 2020, a One World Identity – Top 100 Identity Influencer 2018 and a 2017/8 Delegate to the Australian British Chamber of Commerce FinTech/Cyber trade delegation to London.

cheqd-Logo-email

cheqd.io

Contact:  Australian Data Exchange is business name operated by ID Exchange Pty. Ltd.

Joanne Cooper CEO, ID Exchange

T: 1300 002 678

[email protected]

www.idexchange.me

Photo available on request.

The Data Governance Act paves the way for cheqd

The Data Governance Act paves the way for cheqd blog

This article is a continuation of the Article Data Governance Act meets ToIP Framework. It will explain why many of the provisions of the Data Governance Act, proposed updates to electronic identification and trust services (eIDAS), alongside recent Requests for Proposals made by the European Commission, suggest that a payment layer for Verifiable Credentials is crucial to the proper functioning of a data-sharing model using Verifiable Credentials.

In December 2020, the European Parliament announced that it “…reached a provisional agreement on a new law to promote the availability of data and build a trustworthy environment to facilitate its use for research and the creation of innovative new services and products.”

This new agreement is in the form of the Data Governance Act (DGA).

Some TL;DR, please

The Data Governance Act addresses four key points:

  1. Reusability of public sector data;
  2. Reusability of data between businesses;
  3. Reusability of personal data, directly controlled and consented to by individuals (data subjects); and
  4. Reusability of non-personal and aggregated data for ‘altruistic’ purposes, such as scientific research.

This sounds pretty exciting for everyone in the world of digital identity, because, as we highlighted in a previous blog: data is currently single-use, which is inefficient and costly for all parties involved.

By making data reusable you can kickstart a new economy for data sharing.

This overlap between the intentions of the DGA and the self-sovereign identity (SSI) community was explained well in Trust over IP’s recent article, which explained how the Data Governance Act complemented the core “trust triangle” that the SSI community is familiar with.

Figure 1 from Trust over IPs recent article

Figure 1 from Trust over IP’s recent article

The Intermediary in the diagram above is nothing new to the SSI ecosystem. Usually, in visualisations, the Intermediary is bundled together with the holder, acting as a consent and credential management engine, an “identity agent”, acting on behalf of the user.

And whilst, the Act does not necessarily state that ‘data intermediaries’ must be decentralised, there is a specific section that illustrates a specific category of data intermediaries will need to exist to act in the SSI ‘agent’ capacity.

Recital 23 states:

“A specific category of data intermediaries includes providers of data sharing services that offer their services to data subjects in the sense of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 [GDPR]. Such providers focus exclusively on personal data and seek to enhance individual agency and the individuals’ control over the data pertaining to them. They would assist individuals in exercising their rights under Regulation (EU) 2016/679 […] In this context, it is important that their business model ensures that there are no misaligned incentives that encourage individuals to make more data available for processing than what is in the individuals’ own interest.”

Let’s break this down methodically:

  1. “[Intermediaries that] seek to enhance individual agency and the individuals’ control over the [personal] data pertaining to them”

In an SSI paradigm, this clause is describing intermediaries that enable individuals to have direct control over their personal data. Technically speaking, this type of functionality would be carried out by a digital identity wallet, which supports the EU’s work in creating a framework for digital identity wallets in Europe.

2. “Assist individuals in exercising their rights under Regulation (EU) 2016/679 [GDPR]”

This function is what is commonly thought of as the role of a digital identity agent, allowing users to meaningfully and explicitly consent to the uses of their Credentials and data, including access, rectification and erasure of data.

3. “No misaligned incentives that encourage individuals to make more data available for processing than what is in the individuals’ own interest.”

This clause is interesting and suggests that companies will not be able to scalp customer data in the same way they do today, nor will they be able to offer services in return for data — rather, they will have to specifically receive explicit consent from the user. This could also potentially open up the option for the customer to selectively disclose data, perhaps in return for a monetary incentive. This could be enabled through the use of Verifiable Credentials with BBS+ signatures or through the use of AnonCreds layered on top of cheqd.

In this way, the Data Governance Act directly compliments the work done in the world of SSI, and while it does not mandate the use of SSI, it gives the technology a huge leg-up, legitimising the method of data sharing in law.

eIDAS Bridge and eIDAS v2

Concurrently, alongside the work to reframe the way data is shared, the European Commission has been strategising about how to update eIDAS to best encompass Verifiable Credentials for functioning SSI. Nacho Alamillo Domingo explains the different steps that the EU may consider here. There has since been work to give Verifiable Credentials the same legal effect for cross-member state identity as “Qualified Electronic Signatures (QESs)”. This work has been labelled eIDAS bridge. This would mean that instead of Member States having to exchange SAML files with Qualified Electronic Signatures and timestamps, they could rely on the native cryptographic proofs in Verifiable Credentials.

eIDAS bridge

eIDAS bridge has since published numerous legal and technical deliverables laying out how Verifiable Credentials can be incorporated into an updated eIDAS framework.

What this means for the SSI industry as a whole is that it is being taken very seriously at a supranational legal level. eIDAS v2 is very likely going to update the eIDAS framework with compatibility for Verifiable Credentials.

The value here is that cross border data exchange, as well as third-party KYC reliance in regulated industries such as Financial Services, will both be able to leverage Verifiable Credentials. This will make SSI a much more lucrative offering for such regulated industries, which currently are hesitant to use VCs, as they cannot rely on the contents of the data without doing their own standalone KYC check on new customers.

After eIDAS 2, organisations will be able to legitimately rely on the contents of a Verifiable Credential or Verifiable Presentation as a completed KYC requirement.

cheqd and fees

One pertinent aspect of the Data Governance Act that hasn’t seen too much discussion is the economic angle for data reuse and data sharing between businesses.

Recital 5 highlights that the core goal of the framework for data sharing services is to increase trust in sharing personal and non-personal data and “lower transaction costs” linked to B2B and C2B data sharing.

This supports cheqd’s hypothesis that current costs to onboard new users onto services is onerous and overly expensive because Know-Your-Customer (KYC) checks need to be repeated at every instance of KYC in a regulated industry.

By reducing this KYC cost down to a percentile of the current fee, data sharing will become much more frictionless and will create opportunities for increased trust in industries that do not have the margins for current KYC costs. This, on top of the work of eIDAS v2, seems like it is gravitating towards a similar model to cheqd.

Perhaps more importantly, the Explanatory Memorandum of the Act indicates that the law should be applied to “data sharing amongst businesses, against remuneration in any form”. This means that if data flows in one direction between businesses, there may be a payment or fee as remuneration in the other direction. The specific wording here of “in any form”, may also presuppose that this payment doesn’t necessarily need to be in fiat currency. Article 6 and, to some extent Article 18, supports this within the main body of the Act, laying out transparency requirements for “the fees paid by natural or legal persons processing the data, if any”.

Currently, no payment mechanism has been incorporated into the technical EBSI architecture for SSI, and for this reason, we believe that cheqd has a place in layering on top of both eIDAS v2, the Data Governance Act, EBSI; as it combines the Verifiable Credential flow with a customisable and optional payment flows and fees.

Data Governance Act and eIDAS

The model above complements the intentions and scope of both the Data Governance Act and eIDAS v2 proposals. Moreover, cheqd is architecting its payment rails to be able to work on top of any other identity ledger, such as the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), did:web, did:ion, KERI or other, in a flexible and interoperable way to accommodate for use cases across different jurisdictions and verticals. In this way it does not compete with the likes of EBSI and other utilities, but works alongside them to complete the SSI stack from an economic perspective.

Change on the horizon?

The Data Governance Act, in combination with the latest eIDAS v2 changes, will begin to catalyse change in the way public sector bodies, businesses and individuals interact with data. If properly enforced in conjunction with the GDPR, we will hopefully see fewer abuses of data, and more data sovereignty and direct data control.

We strongly believe that the work of the SSI community, such as Trust over IP, alongside the optionality for fees and native payments by cheqd, creates a functional and privacy-preserving foundation for the goals and intentions of this new Data Governance Act.

And finally, we believe that cheqd can perform a valuable and unique function, overlaying on top of the European framework for data sharing and we hope it can support the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) and European Self Sovereign Identity Framework (eSSIF) going forward.

This is the world cheqd is building for, and it is encouraging to see it being written into formal legislation.

We, at cheqd, help companies leverage SSI. cheqd’s network is built on a blockchain with a dedicated token for payment, which enables new business models for verifiers, holders and issuers. In these business models, verifiable credentials are exchanged in a trusted, reusable, safer, and cheaper way — alongside a customisable fee.

Find out more about our solution here or get in touch if you wish to collaborate and/or join our ecosystem by contacting us at [email protected].

Indacoin Announces Strategic Partnership with cheqd

cheqd_Indacoin-1-2

March 11, 2022 /Indacoin/ — Indacoin, a leading fiat-to-crypto exchange company, has announced a strategic partnership with cheqd.io, a high-tech company seeking to become the de-facto payment mechanism for trusted data. As part of the collaboration, both companies will cooperate to drive mass adoption of the $CHEQ token and make it available to millions of credit and debit cardholders in more than 180 countries to accelerate the adoption of SSI.

Data ownership and digital identity are crucial for a decentralized world to become a reality. cheqd offers a powerful cross-industry, global and web3 solution via an incentivized network that enables payment rails in its #CHEQ token for enterprises, individuals, consortiums, and government organizations. To achieve this, cheqd’s innovative payment rails allow businesses to create new commercial models for authentic/trusted data and self-sovereign identity (SSI). Their network provides the means of payment between organizations and individuals — that issue, hold and receive trusted data globally. Thus, data and identity issuers, verifiers, and holders can pay each other for data and digital credentials without compromising users’ security creating new data marketplaces powered by cheqd and the CHEQ token.

To enable the mass adoption of $CHEQ, the cheqd team has decided to work with Indacoin. As such, every owner of Visa and MasterCard will be able to purchase native $CHEQ with ease in a safe space within minutes.

This provides easy access to the $CHEQ token for building SSI solutions atop the public-permissionless network, as well as for staking and liquidity mining rewards.

Anvar Sidorov, Partnerships Director at Indacoin, commented on the news:

“cheqd is an exciting project designed to make it easier for individuals and organizations to trust each other, so we are pleased to support them on their mission. We, at Indacoin, will do our best to facilitate the mass adoption of $CHEQ as decentralized identity and data sovereignty becomes a major concern.”

About cheqd.io:

cheqd is a technology company enabling individuals and organizations to take full control of their data. It provides payment rails, customizable 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 more:
Website, Twitter, Telegram, Medium, Github, LinkedIn

About INDACOIN:
Indacoin is a pioneer fiat-to-crypto gateway with Visa and Mastercard processing globally. The company has been operating since 2014 and its primary focus lies in developing anti-fraud software, which has enabled millions of users worldwide to quickly and safely buy cryptocurrencies. Indacoin is one of the most prominent players in the crypto community that provides risk-free transactions for more than 100 partners.

Partnerships at cheqd

Partnerships at cheqd

This blog is the first part of two. It is addressed to the self-sovereign identity (SSI) community. Part two will be focused on cheqd’s partnerships approach with node operators who are not SSI vendors, and folks from the Cryptographic community.

Collaboration is the new innovation

No company is an island. The ecosystem which it inhabits is critical to its success. This is especially true for companies seeking to disrupt established paradigms. Simply put, industry-shifting innovation like SSI can be accelerated by a dynamic incentivised network like cheqd, and for this vision to materialise collaboration is paramount.

Collaboration through partnering is nothing new to innovation and has been critical throughout human history. Darwin himself famously remarked, “In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively… prevailed.” In the fast-changing business world of today, we could easily substitute “improvise” with “innovate,” and innovation coupled with collaboration can enable rapid mass-scale transformation, and consequently propel accelerated SSI adoption.

Central to this vision is cheqd’s offering to our partners. We’re offering never-before-seen commercial models, payment rails, innovation at scale, the creation of new ecosystems and what I refer to as; enhanced organisational ambidexterity.

Partnerships augment organisational ambidexterity

Partnerships at cheqd will provide a framework for new commercial approaches that can balance the importance for our partners of maintaining business continuity with necessary strategic change.

On the one hand, our partners can continue to profit from current business opportunities whilst maintaining continuity of service, and on the other hand, they can efficiently explore new commercial models and innovation our network enables that aligns with their overarching vision. Our partners can share risks and costs associated with innovation and value creation and benefit from a suite of mobile and backend software tools that can be embedded by cheqd, whilst implementing strategies to capitalize and capture new value created by cheqd’s network.

This is the kernel of partnerships with the SSI community at cheqd. We strongly believe we can augment our partners’ organisational ambidexterity and enhance strategic outlook with new value capture, monetise self-sovereign identity in innovative ways and ultimately bring SSI to more markets.

cheqd’s Partnership Methodology

As Head of Partnerships at cheqd, a strong conviction of mine is we must put our partners first and work from them backwards. It’s one of the main reasons I joined cheqd, as I quickly discovered this conviction was shared by cheqd’s founders Fraser Edwards, and Ankur Banerjee.

To achieve this for our partners, this is what you can expect. We will Explore, Engage, Empathise, Enable:

  • Explore: Preliminary discovery of value hypothesis and vision alignment.
  • Engage: Establish credibility and trust, deliver initial value propositions, initiate roadmap and goals towards shared vision, expand and transform with commercial & technical drivers.
  • Empathise: Relationship building, stakeholder engagement, long lasting value formed.
  • Enable: Building with our trusted partner, iterating and innovating cheqd’s resources and network to continually define success and create value for the entire ecosystem.

Our SSI partnership methodology will start with the focus on our partners, will culminate with the enablement of new ecosystems through our network and will continually prioritise our partners success through industry best practices and within a framework of innovation & delivery.

Join cheqd as a partner

We are currently running TestNet with strong inbound interest from key members of the SSI community and existing SSI partners like Evernym and DIDx leading the way. Our MainNet launch is on the imminent horizon as we value speed-to-market.

To join our network, we have an onboarding system in place where you will get started with:

  • A kick-off meeting with myself, and relevant internal stakeholders.
  • A welcome pack and partner intake form.
  • Access to our open-source Slack community for setting up and troubleshooting your node, and TestNet token distribution.
  • Regular meetings as required (we know sometimes a 10-minute call solves problems much faster than 30 minutes of text).
  • Weekly network updates through newsletters and access to all social media channels.
  • An iterative process, which will evolve and change pending your feedback.
  • We’re also open to co-marketing activities, such as events and digital campaigns.

We’ve run internal timers on setting up nodes for TestNet and have onboarded experienced technical operators and business stakeholders. We’re looking at minimal time commitment, ensuring our partner’s development sprints, cycles aren’t diverted or impacted. It’s simple, quick and easy!

If you’re interested in a partnership, or to know more about our program, please visit this page: http://cheqd.link/partnership

To get started and onboarded please contact Tobias Halloran at [email protected]

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TobiasHalloran

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiashalloran/