As 2024 speeds by, we’re advancing our products to drive the industry forward. Our commitment remains steadfast: to foster a more equitable, decentralised, and trusted world for businesses and individuals.
At cheqd, we pride ourselves on keeping our community and supporters well-informed about our progress, insights, and future directions. In this update, we’ll highlight our key achievements from Q2 and the first part of Q3. If you’re interested in how our journey began this year, be sure to check out our Q1 round-up.
This year has been nothing short of transformative for cheqd, marked by several groundbreaking advancements that have propelled us forward.
Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve accomplished:
Highlights & Key Achievements
1. Analytics and Insights in the Creds Creator Studio
We’re thrilled to announce the introduction of Analytics and Insights to the Creds Creator Studio. This new feature empowers community managers with valuable, trusted data about their community members, known as collectors. It helps them identify and reward top contributors and uncover deeply engaged superfans. Additionally, informed decisions can be made regarding changes in campaign strategies to optimise community engagement and grow trust or loyalty.
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with creators noting that these insights are helping them better understand their communities and craft more personalised experiences.
To see this in action, check out our demo video available here
📊Our New Analytics Tools are Live on @Creds_xyz
🚀Discover your most active superfans, popular creds, and more. Kudos to @rosspower for the demo.
💡Leverage the insights to tailor marketing campaigns to grow customer engagement.
✅Start a free trial: https://t.co/lM8qDIiaay pic.twitter.com/HBEq87i0eD
— cheqd.io 🆔 ⚛️ (@cheqd_io) May 23, 2024
Want to have a play with Creds for yourself? Have a community that could benefit from being recognised better?
Get started with Creds now; pick a plan.
2. Sell a Credential Launched within the Creator Studio
Credential payments are a crucial element of our mission at cheqd. As a reminder, we believe that for decentralised identity to go mainstream, a robust commercial model is essential that encourages data issuers to release data to the individual.
Our ‘Sell a Credential’ feature exemplifies this model, offering a unique way to monetise directly through verifiable credentials. Within the Creator Studio, creators can set a price and limit of credentials, creating rarity and increasing desire, in a few clicks — check it out 👇
This first-of-its-kind opportunity allows for direct revenue generation while building trust within the community.
Visit the link be to see this innovative feature in action, explore how it facilitates trust-building and community engagement, and see our demo video.
🥳Sell a Credential – New Feature on @Creds_xyz🎢
— cheqd.io 🆔 ⚛️ (@cheqd_io) June 13, 2024
🏦Learn how to set price, limit, and customise the rarity of your creds to reflect the campaign uniqueness with @rosspower
Build & Monetise TRUST💕whilst engaging your community!
✅Start a free trial: https://t.co/f7IRFzI5y3 pic.twitter.com/3tn0ZM3nuD
3. Creds Studio Light Mode
As Creds has evolved, we’ve seen new interest from varying industries. As such, we’ve realised the need for a more traditional look and feel for the studio, which we’ve implemented as a light mode. This is now available for creators using the studio, and we’ll be mirroring this on the app in the future.
4. cheqd Studio Launch
We have refined our SaaS product offering, formerly known as cheqd Studio, to focus more on the specific differentiators of the cheqd Network and its underlying functionality. Specifically, the product focuses on trust infrastructure, including DIDs, Trust Registries and Status Lists; and payment infrastructure, including verifier-pays-issuer with USDC, and EURO stablecoin support. These concepts are at the heart of cheqd’s core Network functionality, enabling us to fully productise “cheqd” and its unique benefits compared to other verifiable data registries..
Through creating API keys, developers will be able to authenticate with our suite of APIs, allowing them to consume cheqd’s identity functionality into any existing or new application. This, therefore opens cheqd up to the market of developers looking to establish credential-based ecosystems with robust and enterprise-ready trust and payment models.
This evolution refocuses and double-downs on cheqd’s specialist elements, allowing for other partners or parties to build credential ecosystems on top of the network with simple API integrations. We also provide a comprehensive suite of documentation to get started with all elements of cheqd Studio, including Credential Payments and Trust Registries.
For more details, check out our updated website and the latest blog that delves into the features and benefits of cheqd Studio.
5. Trust Registries with DID-Linked Resources Gaining Respect and Interest!
In April, Alex, one of our Product Managers, and Tasos, our Head of Engineering, presented our innovative approach to trust registries at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in Mountain View, California.
Our focus was on simplifying the creation and management of trust registries through DID-Linked Resources as a common mechanism for storing, retrieving and resolving trust registry entries. This presentation garnered significant attention and respect, positioning our DID Linked Resources as a key differentiator for the cheqd network. It has led to significant partnership developments, which we’re itching to share more about as they evolve.
In June 2024, we partnered with Soverio, Netis and Danube Tech to take our trust registry approach to the European Blockchain Sandbox. and now we are working on a harmonised approach to a “universal” trust registry resolver mechanism, compliant with:
- The Trust over IP Trust Registry Protocol Specification
- EBSI’s approach to Trust Chains
- Traditional X.509 certificate chains and DNS records
- OpenID Federation
More to come on this soon 👀
Additionally, we’re proud to share that cheqd’s DID Linked Resources have been accepted as a W3C draft specification.
This milestone underscores their impact and potential to become a widely adopted standard for cheqd and beyond.
Find the DID-Linked Resources spec here.
6. Improving Our Response to Feedback & the General UX of Our Products
Since our founding in 2021, we’ve embraced a dynamic startup mentality characterised by rapid development and iteration. The principle of “move fast and break things” has guided us as we’ve tested our products in the market.
As we transition from proof-of-concept and MVP stages to scalable, monetisable products, we’re addressing emerging issues strategically.
This includes welcoming Senior QA Engineer Radek, who brings a wealth of experience to enhance our testing strategies and product quality.
We’ve also introduced Featurebase, a new feedback-reporting tool that allows our community to suggest features, report bugs and provide feedback easily.
Head to the new dashboard now at feedback.creds.xyz, and share your thoughts.
You can also report them directly from the creds studio or creds app, shown below:
We’re also implementing Baselime, a tool designed to capture and analyse user logs, metrics, and traces to resolve issues proactively before they impact users.
As we reflect on these achievements, we’re excited about the future and committed to continuing our progress in the year ahead.
Q3 and Beyond - What's Next?
As we continue to advance through 2024, we’re excited to share a glimpse into what lies ahead for cheqd in Q3 and beyond. Building on our recent successes, we’re gearing up for a series of new initiatives and innovations that will further enhance our offerings and drive the industry forward.
Stay tuned as we unveil upcoming features, strategic developments, and new partnerships to help us achieve our vision of a more decentralised and trusted world.
Here’s a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon:
1. Exposing APIs in Creds
To enhance Creds’ utility and integration, we are focusing on making it the premier platform for community reputation management through a robust set of APIs. This quarter, we’re developing tools that will allow external developers to interact with Creds programmatically. We aim to offer a seamless experience for creators and collectors alike by enabling them to issue, build, and manage credentials through these APIs.
The API initiative is structured into three main areas. First, we will introduce the capability to issue credentials via API. This feature will enable creators to issue credentials using pre-built templates from within the studio and connect external sources to these templates, significantly reducing manual effort and boosting the number of credentials issued. Currently, creators can issue via CSVs or manually enter usernames, reducing their work’s scalability and efficiency. With automated issuance, they can set up integrations and leave them to run, issuing programmatically based on rules set in their existing platforms and tools.
Next, we will implement the ability to verify credentials via API. This will allow credentials to be verified within other applications, websites, or platforms, potentially as part of a broader verification portal. This feature will facilitate using credentials to access various digital and physical spaces, from applications to events.
Finally, we will roll out functionality to build and store credential templates (reusable credential format/styles/attributes) via API. This will enable users to submit and manage credential templates through an API, including creating custom templates in JSON format based on provided specifications.
Check out a preview below, demonstrating how creators will generate API keys:
2. Implementations of Advanced Tokenomics
In the second half of the year, we are putting significant focus on enhancing the network’s tokenomics on a few fronts, introducing:
1. An EIP-1559 style burn, inspired by Ethereum’s approach:
This will mean any transaction on the network will burn $CHEQ tokens, e.g. transfers, proof-of-stake delegations, not just identity ledger writes, such as DIDs, schema, revocations, writes. Crucially, this will affect payments across the network, including part of “credential payments”, making sure there is protocol revenue in the form of burnt $CHEQ tokens for every payment executed.
With this network enhancement, as demand increases, the community can decide whether $CHEQ tokens consumed continue to be burnt, maintaining a deflationary effect or whether they should instead be distributed to speakers as a replacement for staking rewards from inflation. This will also include preparatory work so that all identity and general transaction fees can be priced in stable dollar terms.
2. Fee abstraction
This will allow anyone holding a Cosmos token to pay for transactions on the cheqd network, with said Cosmos token converted to $CHEQ tokens as required to pay for fees. As a specific example, it will enable the adoption of USDC and EUROe or EURC for credentials payments and beyond, which is covered in more detail below.
3. A general burn transaction
This will simply allow anyone to burn $CHEQ tokens as desired.
Additionally, we are exploring strategies related to maximal extractable value (MEV). MEV involves optimising block production for profitability by selectively including, omitting, or reordering transactions. Integrating such mechanisms will further enhance our network’s efficiency and economic model.
3. Investigations and Implementation of USDC and EUROe Support
We are working on incorporating support for stablecoins like USDC and EURO-based currencies to facilitate smoother transactions for companies verifying credentials. By allowing payments in these currencies, we can offer MiCA-regulated payments on top of the cheqd Network, allowing companies to adopt our credential payments and trust utilities within regulatory-compliant ecosystems.
This will also simplify the process for companies to on-ramp and off-ramp without needing to interact directly with CHEQ, creating much more user-friendly journeys for businesses looking to use cheqd’s identity functionality but for whom $CHEQ falls outside of their risk appetite, widening the range of companies who can comfortably adopt cheqd.
Additionally, we plan to enable consortia to implement payment schemes on top of cheqd, allowing them to align payment models with the flow of verifiable credentials.
4. Making cheqd the Easiest and Best Place to Build and Manage Trust Registries
This goal is to simplify the creation and management of Trust Registries for SSI vendors integrating with cheqd Studio. This will help organisations accredit others for specific purposes, offering an alternative or additional element to traditional X.509 and centralised Trusted List infrastructures.
We aim to position cheqd as a leading “trust infrastructure” solution, aligning our trust registry implementation with the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), while also maintaining compatibility for other styles or formats. This alignment would offer EU market customers a viable option for setting up trust registries without necessarily requiring a “qualified” trust service provider.
Additionally, we are exploring the concept of payment-gated trust registries to leverage cheqd’s payment rails and further boost the adoption of the network. This would allow governance authorities and companies to charge verifiers to check whether an issuer is “accredited” to issue certain types of credentials for specific purposes within a set of jurisdictions.
5. Gamified Collector Experience with Collector Quests and Metrics
To enhance user engagement and make Creds more engaging, we are introducing gamification elements such as Quests and credential metrics.
Quests are common amongst the Web 3 community-builder space to incentivise user engagement, and we foresee this type of community activation being popular in broader industries, such as education, gaming, corporate community building, and e-sports.
To help create a more fun and competitive Collector experience, we’ll provide Collectors with metrics on their credential views, shares, and verification, helping them understand their progress and reputation-building efforts.
This initiative aims to make the platform more enjoyable and sticky, helping creators identify and retain their best members and superfans.
6. Open Source Contributions Ramping Up
Our Interchain KYC project with NymLab continues to advance, with the recent cheqd network upgrade (v2) enabling this module’s functionality across other IBC-enabled chains. This upgrade allows cheqd’s native identity features to be utilised throughout the Cosmos ecosystem, providing a reusable KYC solution for various projects.
We’re also working on a ZK-proof KYC credential issued by a cheqd DID, which can be consumed by other AppChains. This differentiates our approach by offering both full KYC credentials with detailed personal information and basic ZK-KYC proofs that can be used across Cosmos chains and dApps on a selective basis.
Also, excitingly, we expect to see more Open-source contributions from our partners and community that leverage cheqd via our community pool to make cheqd’s DID-Linked Resources and Trust Registry capabilities as interoperable and widely available as possible. Through these contributions, we should be able to have cheqd’s unique functionality supported in a much wider array of SSI offerings and applications, generating significantly more network volume.
Conclusion
As we progress through 2024, we’re excited about the future and the incredible developments on the horizon.
Our commitment to innovation and enhancing our platform is unwavering, and we can’t wait to share more about how these advancements will benefit our community and reshape the landscape of decentralised identity.
Stay tuned for more updates as we roll out these new features and improvements. In the meantime, we encourage you to connect with us, explore our latest offerings, and be part of the journey towards a more trusted and decentralised world. Your support and engagement are what drive us forward.
As always, you can find the cheqd Product Team on Telegram, Discord, or contact us directly via email at [email protected].
Let’s continue to build something amazing together!
