Introduction
Sovrin has undoubtedly been one of the most influential projects in the decentralized identity world, bringing the fundamental concept of “Self-Sovereign Identity” to the fore. Not only was Sovrin a pioneer for building out the concept SSI itself, but it curated a community of like-minded individuals to come together and begin thinking about the broader issues regarding privacy, data protection and identity.
This community, established in part by Sovrin, has now become a beating heart of significant technological development and societal shift, taking an idea from inception to international implementation, laying the foundation for work such as the European Union’s eIDAS 2.0 regulation.
As such, we are genuinely saddened by the announcement of the potential closure of the Sovrin network next year. We recognise this will leave projects and ecosystems searching for a home. Therefore, we are committed to offering both financial and technical support to any projects considering migration from Sovrin, Hyperledger Indy-based networks, or any other network where concerns around future upgrades, adoption, development, or ongoing support may arise.
What next?
Based upon public announcements, Sovrin mainnet is expected to be shut down by the end of March 2025, possibly earlier, after which it will be unavailable, for both writes and reads. Transparently, we have also reached out directly to the Sovrin team to see if there are any other alternatives.
Owing to the historical significance of Sovrin and the current projects running on top of the network, cheqd is making available a grant scheme (in $CHEQ) to facilitate the migration of traffic across to cheqd by minimising any switching cost.
Within this scheme, we will be able to reference historic did:sov DIDs using the alsoKnownAs property within our did:cheqd method, creating equivalent DIDs potentially based on the same key pairs.
Moreover, we will be able to support all of Sovrin’s functionality, including AnonCreds schemas, credential definitions and revocation lists through our AnonCreds Object Method, allowing for projects to continue operating as usual with minimal service disruption.
Further, as we have already done with Credo, we will be extending our support into ACA-Py to provide support for both major SDKs used by the Sovrin community. We will be in attendance at IIW and we will speak with the current maintainers of Sovrin to explore what might be the most effective solution for those projects built on the network, as they will need to find an alternative network to maintain business continuity.
A Grant Scheme
We will be providing a grant in our native token, $CHEQ, to fund transactions which require migration. This grant is primarily intended for those building on Sovrin, but we would also be happy to accommodate those looking to migrate from other networks or methods, such as did:web, did:ion or other networks to take advantage of the cutting edge functionality we provide (see following section) whilst it is open.
If you are interested in speaking to our team about a potential migration from Sovrin or another network, please fill out the form below, which will help our team curate the best migration path for your business.
Benefits of cheqd
Like we mentioned in our recent blog on Expanding cheqd into ACA-Py, cheqd provides a few improvements on Sovrin / Hyperledger Indy networks in terms of:
- Interoperability: Through cheqd support, projects historically on Sovrin can expand more easily to other credential formats such as VC JWTs, SD-JWTs or JSON-LD – as well as AnonCreds, with each being able to resolve to the same foundational DID method. This will allow projects to expand to meet EU ARF requirements as they develop further.
- Speed: cheqd is able to crunch over 5,000 transactions per second, improving on Indy/Sovrin’s ~4 transactions per second.
- Decentralisation: cheqd is able to support over 100 node operators (currently at 64), building on Indy/Sovrin’s maximum of 25.
- Trust Registries: cheqd supports ledger based trust registries through a “Verifiable Accreditation” model (see documentation here), allowing tiered hierarchies of trust to be built into its supported ecosystems.
- Monetisation models: cheqd supports “payment gated” DID-Linked Resources, which facilitate “Verifier pays Issuer” commercial models. This optional feature affords ACA-Py communities and builders a new way to monetise their product offerings, with payments available in MiCA regulated eMoney including for USD and EURO.
- Ecosystem: cheqd’s infrastructure is built on the Cosmos SDK, which is an actively maintained ecosystem with a healthy developer community and ~50 commits to main per week. cheqd itself then deploys multiple releases per year, always with significant feature releases, e.g. fee abstraction where users no longer need to hold the underlying $CHEQ token.
We’ve been building since 2021 and for a more in depth analysis of how cheqd compares against Hyperledger Indy and Sovrin, please see the comparison table in our documentation here.
A tribute
It is important to touch on how Sovrin helped us get where we are today. Crucially, it is because of Sovrin that many of the cheqd team stepped into the world of SSI for the first time, with Ankur, Fraser and Alex all separately being in attendance of the Sovrin Meetup in May 2019, two years before the launch of cheqd.
Moreover, Alex proceeded to write his masters’ thesis on the Sovrin model of SSI – which would, in turn, alter the entire course of his career trajectory into the newly established world of Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers and Governance.
In short, as a team, we owe a lot to the work of the Sovrin community, trustees and fundamental concepts and ideas that have shaped the way the world is moving forward with regards to trust, identity and self-sovereignty. And owing to this, we would like to extend our help to the community that helped us get to where we are today.
If you want to know more, please fill the form above or get in touch with our team.