Introduction
Businesses face mounting pressure to build trust and protect data privacy in a digital economy. Decentralised identity and verifiable credentials have emerged as transformative technologies that can solve these challenges, yet adoption remains hindered by complexity and technical barriers.
Hovi, a digital credential and identity platform, set out to eliminate these obstacles by providing organisations with simple, no-code tools and developer-friendly APIs for issuing and verifying digital credentials. To unlock the full potential of its platform, Hovi partnered with cheqd, a leading decentralised trust and payment infrastructure provider. Together, we deliver a powerful combination: Hovi’s ease of deployment with cheqd’s scalable, interoperable network and unique commercial models. This partnership is already being put into practice through early pilots, including a UK security guard licensing initiative and an education credentialing project with a Brazilian healthcare training company.
Challenges
Despite the clear advantages of decentralised identity, Hovi recognised recurring pain points faced by businesses looking to adopt the technology:
- Technical Complexity: Implementing decentralised identity solutions often demands significant technical expertise, deterring smaller companies and non-technical teams.
- Integration Barriers: Organisations worry about costly infrastructure overhauls and the risk of vendor lock-in when introducing new identity systems.
- Scalability Concerns: Many existing solutions struggle to provide the reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency required for production-grade, multi-ecosystem deployments.
- Cost of Adoption: Businesses face high implementation costs without efficient tools and well developed infrastructure. This slows down adoption.
- Compliance & Trust: Ensuring that verifiers can reliably identify accredited issuers isn’t easy. Regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, eIDAS 2.0) are often fragmented and difficult to enforce as well.
Hovi knew that overcoming these challenges required not only a simplified platform but also a stable, production-ready infrastructure partner capable of delivering scalability, interoperability, and commercial sustainability.
Why Hovi Partners with cheqd
To overcome these challenges, Hovi was determined to look for an infrastructure partner that could render both technical robustness and long term flexibility. Upon thorough examination, cheqd turned out to be the ideal fit amongst competitors.
- Production Ready Infrastructure: cheqd offers a highly scalable identity network with fast resolution and low transaction fees. This makes it possible for Hovi to support enterprise-grade use cases while preserving performance and cost efficiency across multiple ecosystems.
- Trust Registries for Clear Governance: With cheqd’s Trust Registry model, Hovi can reference accredited issuers and governance frameworks directly in credentials. This simplifies relying-party trust decisions and ensures that only credentials from recognised issuers are accepted.
- DID-Linked Resources: cheqd enables Hovi to anchor and dereference public metadata tied to decentralised identifiers for organisations and AI agents. These resources can then be incorporated into verification policies, creating greater clarity and consistency in trust frameworks.
- Reduced Lock-in Risk: cheqd’s clear migration roadmap and active community support help Hovi avoid vendor or ledger lock-in, facilitating adoption amid the ecosystem development.
- Streamlined Integration: cheqd’s well-documented APIs and developer tooling massively shorten integration time, which enables Hovi to bring its Organisational Wallet API and verifier flows to the market faster.
Outcomes and Impact
Since integrating with cheqd, Hovi has been able to put its vision into practice across multiple initiatives. By leveraging cheqd’s infrastructure, Hovi has strengthened trust, interoperability, and scalability in its platform:
- Pilots in Production: Hovi now uses did:cheqd for issuer and verifier trust ecosystems in selected pilots. This has standardised discovery and DID resolution inside the platform. Two pilots are already underway, one in the UK with Salibo (Security sector) and another in Brazil with G7MED (EdTech).
- Stronger Trust Policies: Hovi will be able to configure Trust Registry checks so verifiers can accept credentials only from accredited issuers. This will improve policy clarity and reduce risk around credential misuse.
- Multi-Network Support: With cheqd, Hovi is able to support multiple DID methods, including did:cheqd. This guarantees interoperability with partner ecosystems and reduces the risk of reliance on a single network.
- AI Agent Credentials: Hovi has started exploring did:cheqd for AI agent DIDs in pilots and issuing verifiable AI agent credentials that bind agent DID, model identity and version, timestamp, and references. This would enable trustworthy digital agent identities.
- Session Credentials for Interactions: Hovi can mint session credentials that capture both agent-to-agent and agent-to-human exchanges to support trustful agent interactions. Verification policies require both issuer and agent DIDs to appear in the Trust Registry before results are accepted, adding an extra layer of assurance.
What the Founders Say
“Hovi’s integration highlights the power of cheqd’s infrastructure: fast resolution, Trust Registries for governance, and DID-linked resources for transparency. We’re making it easier for organisations to adopt verifiable credentials without compromising on trust or flexibility.”
— Fraser Edwards, CEO and Co-founder of cheqd.
“As AI agents become more prevalent, the question isn’t whether they’ll need verifiable identities – it’s whether we’ll have the infrastructure ready to ensure every digital interaction can be trusted and traced to its source.”
— Omer Shafiq, CEO, Hovi
Conclusion
The collaboration between Hovi and cheqd allows organisations to gain a powerful toolkit to issue, verify, and manage digital credentials with confidence. The partnership has already shown tangible results in strengthening trust, improving interoperability, and reducing barriers to adoption. Looking ahead, the ability to support multiple DID methods, configure robust trust policies, and mint verifiable credentials for both humans and AI agents positions Hovi and cheqd at the forefront of the trusted data economy.
Get in touch with cheqd at [email protected] if you are interested in exploring our trust and payment infrastructure.
Contact Hovi at [email protected]
