Self-sovereign identity is on the cusp of global adoption.
From the identity of companies on the Verifiable Organisations Network (VON) to individuals in IATA’s TravelPass, World Economic Forum’s Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) and the EU’s European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF), SSI is seeing global adoption. While it is commendable how far these global collaborations have come, all of these efforts are currently missing a crucial piece.
Incentives.
These are what cheqd will establish. An incentivised credentials network which rewards all of the parties involved in the ecosystem, from the network stewards to the holders to the issuers and verifiers. This initial network will leverage the excellent work by the Sovrin Foundation and their token initiative, forking from the original token codebase. We extend our sincere thanks to them and aim to continue the journey they began.
Beyond providing a viable network for companies to establish businesses upon, we at cheqd see this as essential to drive adoption of SSI, augmenting the noble goal of giving individual’s control of their data again with solid commercial reasons for companies to embrace the new paradigm. People can re-establish their privacy and companies can establish new businesses or revenue streams which have never before been possible.
Beyond building commercially viable use-cases, the network must also be sufficiently rewarded to ensure capacity is made available as needed. This will prevent bottlenecks and avoid accidental denial of identity events, especially given the rapid expansion we expect, driven by the initiatives mentioned above, amongst others.
Whilst commercial viability is key to ensuring the health of the ecosystem and the paradigm, this cannot be achieved to the detriment of the principles below:
- Inclusion (financial or otherwise) must be achieved. The unfortunate and underprivileged, such as the world’s unbanked should not be excluded.
- Privacy must be maintained. Financial transactions cannot be used as a means to identify an individual or their behaviours.
- Sustainability of the ecosystems / economies. cheqd won’t be a flash in the plan, we are here to stay.
There will be a better website and more in-depth blogs in the future (including introducing the senior team) but we’ll keep this one short as, well, we have work to do.
Yours,
The cheqd team
