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!
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:
- Helping list cheqd as a formally supported ToIP Utility in the Utility Directory.
- Co-chairing the Governance Architecture Task Force (GATF), which recently announced it will be working towards a Governance Development Kit (GDK) for SSI ecosystems.
- Co-chairing and leading a deliverable for the Utility Foundry Working Group on comparing different Layer 1 Utilities.
- Contributing to the recently published Technology Architecture Specification.
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
- We had a massive growth of community members and engagement. We close the year with >14k Telegram members, >37k Twitter followers, and >6k Discord members.
- Our airdrop helped us jump from >4k to <75k wallets with $CHEQ.
- We’ve also ranked No.1 in the number of commits for Cosmos chains.
- We ran a bunch of competitions that provided us with cool memes, infographics, and videos.
- The Cosmos doors opened to us, and now we have a bunch of friends in different Cosmos projects. This means we are doing more joint activities and allowing more crossover between our communities.
- Finally, we totally revamped our moderation and ambassadors team.
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. ♥️
