Revolutionizing the Value of Data with cheqd

In this Slogging AMA, the team at cheqd joined us to explain why and how their platform enables the average user and business to take control of their data. The companies aim is to become the payment mechanism for trusted data. Check out our conversation below.

This Slogging thread by Jack Boreham, Fraser Edwards, Matthew Arnold, Cryptodragon, Eduardo Hotta, Sara Pinto, Melissa Brown, Elina Yumasheva, Jimmy L, Char736, Blocklawd, Jack swift, james Burrows, Sonic3625, Terry Jones, Limarc Ambalina, Mónica Freitas, SuperSaiyanProgramming, Jason Green and Ross Power occurred in slogging's official #amas channel and has been edited for readability.

Hi @channel, it's a pleasure to welcome the team from http://cheqd.io, Elina Yumasheva, Eduardo Hotta Fraser Edwards Alex Tweeddale Matthew Arnold

http://Cheqd.io is a market-leading technology company that enables individuals and organizations to take complete control of their data. The company's mission is to become THE payment mechanism for trusted data. Through the use of self-sovereign identity (SSI), cheqd is looking to revolutionize the value of data.

HI Jack Boreham, thanks for having us!!

Greetings Jack, thanks for having us. Hope everyone is well.

Hi Fraser Edwards, Matthew Arnold and team! It's a pleasure to have you with us today. To start, can you give a brief description of your backgrounds, to start this exciting AMA!

Hey Jack Boreham happy to!

I'm Fraser, CEO @ cheqd as of April last year. I'm a jack of all trades with a mix of delivery and technical expertise. Before cheqd I was the delivery lead for http://ktdi.org (pilot building digital passports for international travel with the WEF, Dutch & Canadian governments) and an architect on the jasper-ubin project building cross-blockchain payments with two central banks (Singapore and Canada). I co-authored a couple of patents through this.

https://www.mas.gov.sg/-/media/Jasper-Ubin-Design-Paper.pdf

Before that I worked across blockchain, AI and biometrics whilst at Accenture

Hi all! cheqd seems like an awesome concept. Can you explain a bit more about how cheqd came about?

Great to have you here Eduardo Hotta!!

Howdy Jack Boreham - happy to be here. Hope we can share a bit more about cheqd and how important it is to join our fight to give y’all the ownership and full control of your own data with your community members.

Sure. My background is mainly in technology, development and business intelligence. I have been in crypto for nearly two years. After learning about cheqd I quickly really liked the project, I felt it was delivering a solution to real problems. I now work as the community manager and help out with some of the marketing activities.

Excited to be here! My background is in environmental science and corporate sustainability. I've spent a decade promoting brands and services with the purpose behind them. I've recently moved to the digital identity space as believe we need a greater control of our personal data.

Hey everyone Elina Yumasheva, Eduardo Hotta, Fraser Edwards, Alex Tweeddale and Matthew Arnold. great to have you with us! Could you explain what is a SSI? What's SSI role?

Hi Sara Pinto, SSI stands for self-sovereign identity, it's a new data paradigm where the individual is at the centre of the data ecosystem.

This means that they hold / control their own data rather than companies which use surveillance capitalism as their revenue model.

In SSI an individual (me or you) decides what data they receive, what they share, from and who to.

Hey , myself and Ankur (our CTO and co-founder) spent a couple of years doing sales for self-sovereign identity and we saw loads of sales conversations and proof of concepts die when the client (or potential client) couldn't see a commercial or revenue model to cover the expenses of implementing the new technology.

Eventually, we got annoyed enough that we decided to solve it ourselves by building cheqd which focuses entirely on building payment rails and commercial models for SSI

Hope that answers your question Sara Pinto "

Hi all! Excited to have you all here. I've never heard of web5 is it like web3

Hey Melissa Brown, we've actually answered that here:

https://cheqd.io/ssi/web5

But in short, web5 is a newer marketing name coming from block (formerly square) for self-sovereign identity.

Eduardo Hotta I see you are chief marketer at cheqd! How do you work to market and a build community

Hi , thanks for the question. I wish! haha… I’m no chief marketer, my work here is to enable the marketing team to build a cool brand, create great content, and grow our community (both in numbers and engagement).

To your question our marketing strategy is based on three main pillars (that I’ll share below) and is based on a lot of collaboration (internally and externally) and transparency.

Sorry, I pressed Enter too quickly, but here’s the full answer !

Elina Yumasheva, what made you transition from environmental science to this line of work?

Jack Boreham I've always followed purpose in my work – I'm still involved in environmental work through my art – so in a sense, it's still a continuation of the same purpose-led journey. Tech is a solution to many environmental and social challenges we face today. I wasn't happy with us oversharing our personal data and wanted to do something about it. Working with cheqd to get control of our privacy and data is something I'm very excited about.

How does cheqd fit in the Metaverse Fraser Edwards?

Great question , we actually wrote a lot about this here:

https://metaverseinsider.tech/2022/09/06/enabling-true-digital-identity-in-the-metaverse/

In short, through self-sovereign identity and our partners, we'll be providing the trust and identity layer for the metaverse.

Imagine being able to port your avatar or experience across the metaverse (bit like the different locations in ready player one)

Do you think issues will arise with Meta and other centralised companies storing data? How will you combat this?

Hey , that's exactly the issue we're solving for.

Right now, SSI is an emerging paradigm but it's difficult for companies to do as there is little commercial incentive to do so (most companies rely on surveillance capitalism right now). We're changing that to make it commercially viable.

Surprisingly, a lot of companies want to give data back since it gives better user experiences, they just need the tech to be commercial viable to do so.

What are the use cases of SSI in web3?

Some example use cases of SSI are shown below;

, just to add to Matthew Arnold answer, we've prepared a list of SSI use cases – take a look here https://cheqd.io/solution/self-sovereign-identity/use-cases

Hi guys! Bug fan of your platform!! Can you explain a bit more about your token and how that works with your platform?

our native utility token - $CHEQ - enables individuals to interact with organisations globally and for businesses to reap commercial benefits. In addition to data ownership mentioned above, cheqd provides individuals and companies with a real-world financial incentive to share their data.

$CHEQ holders can also vote in governance proposals and influence the future developments of the cheqd network.

Eduardo Hotta what’s the cheqd council and rebel alliance (I hope that’s a Star Wars reference)

- that is indeed a Star Wars reference, as we see us fighting in the Data Wars!

cheqd Rebel Alliance - are our ambassadors. Their main goal is to spread the word about cheqd and SSI.

The Council of cheqd - is an independent group which Fundamental Analysis people analyse what we’re delivering and where we’re heading. We get great feedback from them and they have influenced some of the stuff we have done.

Elina Yumasheva can you explain a bit more about these financial incentives and commercial benefits?

Jack Boreham I think Fraser kinda answered your question already 😄 I can just add that we've discussed our tokenomics in detail here:

Tokenomics 1 – introduction and governance https://cheqd.io/blog/cheqds-tokenomics-for-ssi-explained-part-1

Tokenomics 2 focusing on the distribution
https://cheqd.io/blog/cheqds-tokenomics-for-ssi-explained-part-2

Tokenomics 3 focusing on the payment models https://cheqd.io/blog/cheqds-tokenomics-for-ssi-explained-part-3-payment-models

All these blogs are extremely helpful for insight into our tokenomics and answer all your questions!

Fraser Edwards how do you want to see your platform evolving in the future. What milestones do you want to reach?

Hey Melissa Brown we've got most of the identity scaffolding in now which means we can focus on the payment rails.

I'd love to have a basic version of the payment rails done by the end of the year but it's entirely novel and greenfield so the time it will take is going to be extremely difficult to quantify before we get started.

Beyond this on the product side, it's all about adoption.

We're already built into the veramo SDK and now animo are building us into Aries Framework Javascript with more to come. This means it'll be easier and easier to work with.

With these SDKs becoming available and the payment rails coming down the line, we're expecting use-cases to begin landing on the network which would be huge and the payment rails specifically we expect to make companies recruit partners onto our network to provide a virtuous spiral

Thanks ! Few parts to this answer in ascending complexity:

We now have the scaffolding of the network in but we're about to hit the big stuff in the payment rails and improved identity transaction costs

Glad to see that our product manager Ross Power joined the AMA!

Eduardo Hotta how can you join both the organisations you mentioned ?

To become an ambassador you have to https://cheqd.io/blog/ambassador-program.

To join the Council of cheqd - just join their https://t.me/CouncilOfcheqd.

Thank you Eduardo Hotta !!

Ross Power great to have you here. Can you tell us a bit about your role at Cheqd?

Fraser Edwards how will you pivot towards adoption? What marketing strategies will you apply Eduardo Hotta

Thanks Melissa Brown. We're at the infrastructure layer so a lot of that has been:

Now we have the majority of these in, it's a case of BD efforts:

Does that answer your question Melissa Brown?

Fraser Edwards it does, thank you! Can you name some of these clients.

Melissa Brown Unfortunately not as we're under NDA with them all, but we're really looking forward to speaking about them as they come onboard the network since that will be public.

We see cheqd as a social network so will be shouting from the rooftops when people join since it creates social proof which will drag more companies in!

I’m curious about the interoperable nature of ssi! Can you explain it using an example, just trying to get my head around it

Hey , absolutely.

Let's say we have:

Interoperability is when all of the above works using different vendors without lock-in. It creates healthy competition. In our case, we're providing a differentiated / unique service in the payment rails but the rest is intended to be interoperable.

One of the use cases for SSI will be NFTs! Do you guys think NFTs will be the future of digital assets?

Hey we see them as separate but with SSI having a massive potential to help NFTs reach their full potential.

I think NFTs will transform digital assets and don't think we've really seen their power yet. Where I see SSI fitting in is proving who issued, owns, owned an NFT and the underlying asset it represents.

it can also allow people to prove ownership without having to expose the account they hold the NFT in.

I'm curious about how $CHEQ holders can influence goverance. Can you guys talk more about that?

Jack Boreham, our governance process and instructions are covered here:
https://docs.cheqd.io/governance/

But in short, token holders can vote on upgrades and protocol direction amongst other things.

Alex Tweeddale would be able to provide more details

Hey Cheqd team! Thanks for joining us here on Slogging. My question is: we've seen virtual reality technology being pushed forward by the gaming industry as the main use case at the moment. Some people say The Metaverse will follow suit and the growth in technology will first come from the gaming sector. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Limarc Ambalina I'm watching metaverse and gaming trends closely. I think it'll extend beyond that. I can see virtual workspaces, offices, board meetings happening in the metaverse. I could also see it crossing metaverse platforms one day. But you're right, the major push for the metaverse is based on gaming ideas at thr moment.

Where SSI fits, is that we will need to verify that we are who we say we are. With that, the data we control following suit. Like my employee number and title. Permissions for restricted access etc. I think it'll blow up, personally.

Hey Limarc Ambalina, I think so. We've already seen a lot of interest in being able to port avatars and experience around and it's only early days.

the gaming industry does have an allergy to tokens and crypto right now (outside of crypto games) but we're expecting that to change as things focus onto real utility

- thank you for the question.

Hi Melissa Brown, to complement Fraser Edwards’s answer on the marketing side. Our plan is to work closely with our SSI partners to help and support them in increasing more brand awareness and lead generation. Our marketing strategy here will be the Web3 equivalent of ‘channel/distribution marketing’ with a dash of traditional ‘lead gen marketing’ (depending on the partner, we can be a bit more sophisticated and help them with ABM).

Without the marketing jargon, the idea is to support our partners with relevant content to their audience and help them run activities to generate more interest in their solutions.

Eduardo Hotta what do you mean by lead gen marketing?

Jack Boreham - some SSI companies are really innovative and have great design/UX. However, they don’t necessarily know how to increase the number of leads (potential customer) they generate. There are a bunch of marketing activities a company can do to generate more leads, one being ABM (Account Based Marketing), another being automated digital campaigns, another being events, and so on so forth.

Since Elina Yumasheva, Tobias (our Head of Partnership) and I have a lot of experience scaling tech companies, we’d be open to sharing some marketing & sales techniques/tactics and also run co-marketing activities with our SSI partners.

Is this answer clear? haha… If not, I can give it another go. ☺

Hi http://cheqd.io team! Great to meet you! My question is what is you unique value proposition? What makes you stand out and ultimately beat the competition?

Hey Mónica Freitas, there are a few other networks in the SSI space like: Sovrin, Indicio & Kilt, but none are focusing on the payment rails / commercial models which is our differentiator.

Ultimately it means anyone building SSI use-cases on the network can build commercial models and generate revenues which they can't do elsewhere

The imagine below sums it up quickly

Fraser Edwards beautifully put. How has your growth as a company been and have you noticed any trends regarding your users?

Mónica Freitas, we only incorporated in April last year.

We're now 15 people, and over 38 SSI partners deep (which we estimate to be over 60% of the entire market).

We launched the network in November and now have the core identity utility on now, with SDKs being amended to support us which is awesome, with more to come.

And that's without mentioning inbound potential clients!

I see Cheqd is GDPR compliant. How do you make sure all your data is protected for reselling etc?

Jack Boreham - easy one. 😉

The beauty of SSI is that you keep YOUR data with you. You fully own, control, and carry your data. Your data is portable and interoperable. Companies do not keep your data, there are no data silos to be leaked, hacked or sold.

And yes, we’re GDPR compliant and we do not keep any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) on ledger.

Hi there! How do you approach SSI while maintaining the anonymity that crypto investors like to keep?

Hey SuperSaiyanProgramming, SSI actually enables anonymity and privacy as a technology.

SSI puts users in control and the privacy mode is private by default so users aren't sharing data all the time.

It's a complete change from surveillance capitalism where they are leaving their data everywhere, instead the focus is only on sharing the data necessary for a certain service

What are your key partners and what is their role in your plan?

, this graphic covers our ecosystem off quite nicely but the key partners are really the SSI vendors:

We also have consultancies who can help commercialise the SSI vendor tech for their clients and expand their reach

Fraser Edwards what has been the biggest challenge in new clients acquisition?

Mónica Freitas I think the classic case of having the features on the network to support the partners and vendors we want to onboard.

We launched the network last November but we're mainly hitting the point now of having those features available to people can use them in anger!

Fraser Edwards you're a relatively recent company, that's normal. But it's great to testify to your growth. Have you noticed any big trends in the market that you might jump on?

Mónica Freitas we noticed recently that web chatter and searches for SSI has grown 114% in the last 5 years. Decentralized Identifiers, which is a component of our framework, search and chatter grew 1100%.

There are consortium and organisations popping up that are getting deeply involved in decentralised identity. W3C also made recommendations for DID standards. I'm sure Fraser can add to this, but there are clear trends that cheqd can benefit from. It extends into a range of industries, both web2 and web3.

You can have a look at the trends here.

https://explodingtopics.com/topic/self-sovereign-identity

https://explodingtopics.com/topic/decentralized-identifier-1

Matthew Arnold, that's good news! How do you plan to expand in the current economic crisis? Have you felt its impacts in your development?

Our expansion will come from our SSI partners who build identity applications that leverage the technologies we support.

Their clients will then consume those applications which will essentially run on our chain.

Due to the growing action on identity, KYC, AML etc, it will be something that I firmly believe will be adopted organically. It is the next natural step for handling our identity and data.

Interesting. I'm not sure if anyone has asked this already, but how do you plan to make interoperability work for you? Some different approaches are being discussed with interoperability, and some gaming platforms are starting to apply them. However, interoperability from a financial perspective is something I haven't found much about yet Matthew Arnold

We're already well underway with that. We'll be releasing some updates to our product roadmap in future which shows what this means.

The idea is we want to be able to support a range of credential and schema types so that we can support many different applications that our partners build.

Imagine building a car that will run on petrol, diesel, water and potato peelings. A very sloppy way of describing it but that's one way if looking at how we're working on interoperability using these credential and schema types.

We've already started supporting some of these standards and our CTO Ankur, will be discussing some of it with our partner Animo solutions in Utrecht on the 19th September. This particular talk is about AnonCreds, another fuel for the aforementioned car.

From a finance perspective, AML and KYC is an important part of verification. What better way to be able to ensure the security and validity of our identity, using a secure and trusted method of SSI.

Loans, mortgage applications and tax payments can all be processed using the data we hold in our digital wallet. All can be completely verified with SSI.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/showcasing-aries-framework-javascript-integration-with-cheqd-network-tickets-403986744227

Fraser Edwards thanks for answering! So, how is SSI different from Web5?

Sara Pinto for SSI and Web5, we've actually written this up here:

https://cheqd.io/ssi/web5

In short, web5 is block's name for SSI and the SSI community is currently figuring out whether to adopt web5 or not, especially as there isn't a strong definition behind it

Sara Pinto for SBTs and SSI, I knocked up a flowchart here:

https://twitter.com/fraser_again/status/1531242166135169024?s=20&t=ytB-q7D9wx2FVzI0H5AoTQ

The short answer is:

It really comes down to the privacy model

Matthew Arnold how do you think you will win the 'data wars' do you think it will come easy? Will this stop this organic adoption you talked about?

Fraser Edwards can you also explain what is SBT and how it connects do SSI and Web5?

I think the cold start problem, how do you create an ecosystem that expands from nothing. It's a lot of alliance building to get things off the ground, then once that's in, it kind of takes care of itself

I think the other part is people, it's hard to find the right people and build the right culture. Sometimes that means letting people go

What would you say are the biggest challenges you've had to face when building cheqd?

Hey Jack Boreham can we help with anymore questions?

Another 45 minutes to go – bring it on, frens!

I think a great round-up question for this AMA would be: What makes you personally excited about Cheqd?

And in a nutshell, why should our audience and other mainstream folks pay attention?

Jack Boreham, great question – thank you! I personally love our mission to give individuals greater control of their data.

Jack Boreham, as per why people should pay attention – cheqd brings simplicity, ease and fairness by inverting existing models of data ownership. Individuals can collect their profiles on any service that they have full control over, sharing access to organisations only when needed and with permission. This makes it quicker, safer and cheaper to create a profile on a new digital service and to be able to switch to any competing offerings easily. For the first time, individuals and the companies that validate their online identities, such as passport offices, banks and utilities, are financially rewarded. Data is the new gold, and cheqd is the store of value.

This ability to trust that the individual or organisation is who they say they are changes everything forever. If you’re cheqd, you’re ready for the real benefits of the digital world.

Jack Boreham we're building at a rate that is much faster than we expected, we've got some great support from our SSI partners who are building and integrating SDK's and keen to develop them. I actually don't think that we'll face much challenge when we have a fully working product. Due to our mission of supporting as many schema and credential types as possible, I feel we'll be the natural choice for SSI vendors when it comes to SSI implementations. I think it will just be the case that people will come to us as we'll do everything they'll probably need.

We'll shortly be releasing our pricing tokenomics and those detail will demonstrate why it is we will be an easy choice for SSI vendors to build with us. I have worked in many projects, but what the team are building here is first class. This is exactly why I joined. I have no doubt we will win the data wars.

Thank you all for your replies. That's a wrap on this AMA. We would like to thank the entire team at cheqd for partaking! It's been so great to have you.💚

Thank you all for participating – this was great!

Jack Boreham, thank you for having us, and thanks for your questions. I hope we left a clear vision of our mission.