AMA Recap: Cheqd X CryptoBlade
Host: I welcome our guests @ankurdotb and @tweeddalex
Ankur: Hey all! 👋 Ankur here, CTO and co-founder at cheqd
Alex: Hey guys! Thanks for letting us on here 🥳
Alex here, governance and compliance lead
Host: Great to meet you, I’m Finn
Let’s start AMA Session
First of all please introduce yourself, For how long you’ve been building & planning “Cheqd” project?
Ankur: I’m Ankur Banerjee, CTO and co-founder of cheqd. I’ve got a background in software engineering, product dev and innovation. Been working in the blockchain space for about 5 years now, on a range of enterprise and public use cases including in the exciting bits of self sovereign identity. For instance, I worked with the National Health Service in the UK to make it easier for doctors to use digital ID to move between different hospitals.
My co-founder, Fraser, worked with the World Economic Forum on a project between the governments of Canada and Netherlands called Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI.org)
We started in March 2021, we shipped private beta by July. Our public testnet went live in August 2021 and we’re working towards a mainnet release by October 2021.
Alex: I’m Alex Tweeddale, Governance & Compliance Lead. I come from a legal background, specialising in the intersection between law and decentralised technologies, which has led me to self-sovereign identity. Before cheqd I’ve worked on some of the most large scale SSI projects, such as with the US Department of Homeland Security.
Ankur and I actually worked together at a start up before cheqd, which is where all the planning started — as we saw the inefficiencies in SSI, and that it needed real business value.
Host: Can you also share some information about your team and founders?
How big is the team right now?
Ankur: You should come say hi to our team! https://www.cheqd.io/about
We’re about 8 people now, plus an external team of 7 devs.
We’re lucky that our team understands both the blockchain world as well the world of digital identity. We’ve got deep expertise working with governments, financial services, healthcare, blockchain and other sectors. Our team is also all united by our mission to make the world a better place and here we’re working hard on giving people their privacy back.
A bit more about me, I’ve also been heavily involved in SSI for the past few years. Some of my previous work is as the lead architect behind https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/blockchain-automation-framework with Hyperledger Foundation, one of the largest open source blockchain foundations.
And, my co-founder and CEO is Fraser Edwards, his most recent project before cheqd was building SSI for international travel with two governments and the World Economic Forum (ktdi.org) and before that was working with two central banks on cross-blockchain patents (with the governments of Canada and Singapore).
Our CFO Javed has experience building blockchain and fintech companies that are regulated and with assets under management upwards of $100mns. And the rest of our team with Eduardo, Alex, Elina, Ross, Toby are all highly experienced in startup world and passionate about blockchain and identity.
Host: Cool! Thanks for the background. Are you currently expanding and adding more talents to your team?
Ankur: At the moment, we have a solid core team and focussed purely on going live. So while we aren’t recruiting at the moment, we look to hire developers and business folks in a couple of months
Host: Great!
Excited to know more about Cheqd project
Alex: We are focussed on going live with our current team. Although, we’re always looking for passionate people about identity and crypto, it’s an upcoming niche where we expect to see more people getting into. If you’re interested in getting involved, join our communities.
Please make sure to:
Join our Telegram Group: https://t.me/cheqd
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cheqd_io
Visit our website: https://www.cheqd.io
Read our blog: https://blog.cheqd.io
Watch our videos: http://cheqd.link/youtube
And, sign up for a cool surprise right after this AMA here: https://www.cheqd.io/l/get-ready
Host: Can you please explain the main concept behind “Cheqd”?
Ankur: cheqd is a software company that is building a secure network to enable individuals and organisations to take full control of their personal data using blockchain technology.
Think about when you go to a bank to open a new account. You need to provide documents to prove who you are. Or there are other scenarios when you have to prove authentic data, such as when travelling.
We’re working on making this process digital and more secure, and in the control of the user. That’s why it’s called “Self Sovereign” (i.e., in your control) identity.
We’re creating a token, called CHEQ, so companies can monetise self-sovereign identity. It enables new business models, where verifiable credentials are exchanged in a trusted, reusable, safer, and cheaper way.
cheqd makes it easier to create authentic data ecosystems through customisable commercial models and governance structures, all built upon a public permissionless network with a dedicated token for payment. Oh, and authentic data is data, which source can be proved.
Think of your digital identity right now, with Facebook or Google…these are with one single company where they do whatever they want with your data. You have little control or portability behind it
What we’re aiming for is to give the control back from these 100s of accounts you have online to something private, secure, and incentivised with a token which puts you in control.
Alex: Adding from what Ankur has just said, for me cheqd is about:
1. Reclaiming control of data and digital profiles; and
2. Having a tangible way to monetise data, share verified and authentic data in the real world — where all the stakeholders in that transaction can benefit.
Host: That’s awesome. What are the key features that Cheqd will offer to its users?
Ankur: Our core functionality is the ability for individuals and companies to hold digital credentials, and the ability for payments to be made when digital credentials get exchanged. This term is often called “self sovereign identity” or “SSI” — it is identity that you control.
Easily accessible common and public infrastructure
1. Most SSI blockchain ID projects are private permissioned, and we want to change this to public permissionless
2. Our core hypothesis is that self-sovereign identity needs commercial models that accelerate its adoption. Having worked in SSI for 3–4 years, there aren’t really any viable projects that have made business models happen yet
3. We’re providing a common and public infrastructure easily accessible to anyone and any organisation with payment rails between issuers, holders, and receivers of trusted data.
Alex: Standards, compliance and interoperability focus
1. Unlike a lot of other projects, we have deep expertise in digital identity, and working with large trustworthy organisations and governments. For example, we have our CEO Fraser Edwards who worked on international travel with the World Economic Forum; Ankur has worked with the UK govt and banks on digital ID and I’ve worked with the US Department of Homeland Security on digital ID for tracking and tracing products.
2. A lot of other projects are not compatible with the technical and legal standards for how private data should be handled, and we’re working very closely with the community to make sure ours is compliant — and therefore has better adoption. We want to harmonise and unite the decentralised identity industry, rather than fragment it.
Ankur: You can read more here in a blog post we did earlier: https://blog.cheqd.io/the-business-models-of-identity-bb3336773727
Host: I would say great initiative for Privacy Data.
Let’s move to our last question from 1st segment
Can you now tell us what are the utilities of Cheqd?
Ankur: The main utility being to power identity verification transactions. We see it playing a major role in travel, eCommerce and finance (KYC).
And a little bonus, here are possible use cases for SSI.
KYC (Know Your Customer): Most processes that touch finance usually require verifying your ID.
Travel: International and domestic travel, especially in the age of covid, require visas, passports, and other documents to be shared.
NFT: SSI can solve the provenance issue with NFTs regardless of the ledger.
Content: fully decentralised content consumption with payment and identity, i.e. consumption of media / content directly from the creator without a distribution channel. A possibility for creators to receive fair payments for their work and interact with audiences directly.
Identity tied to payments: There’s no way to verify the identity of the payment receivers in crypto/DeFi transfers beyond the wallet address. It’s a problem even for low-volume transfers, but increasingly more so on high value transfers. There is always a need for anonymous payments im crypto, but equally there are occasions when it’s useful to verify who is receiving funds.
Decentralised storage: SSI can be implemented to manage the data of participants and store distributed files with decentralised access control
Alex: cAdding on from this too, decentralised identity and the technical standards involved (Verifiable Credentials and Decentralised Identifiers) can also be used for:
Corporate or organisational identity
Making it easier to trust companies you are interacting with, especially over the internet
Product or package identity
Enabling more efficient and effective track and trace for real world supply chains
So a very very wide range of potential future use!
Host: Lots of interesting and cool stuff in Cheqd project
Let’s now proceed to the questions from Twitter.
Participant: Sir, After checking the website, cheqd.io vision & Mission is good. but it needs a large user traffic to be sustainable over time. What is your marketing strategy to increase the validity of your project brand? Are you planning a strategic partnership to level up your project?
Ankur: Great question! One of our biggest investors and partners is Evernym, which is working with governments and large enterprises around the world. For example, they are building the IATA Travel Pass — which is the global international airline body for how Covid test results and vaccine results will be handled by airlines globally. See their list of customers at: https://www.evernym.com/customers/
Beyond Evernym, we are working with engaging other partners and app developers in the DeFi/blockchain ecosystem as well. For instance, we published something recently on CeDeFi with Unizen: https://blog.cheqd.io/why-centralised-decentralised-finance-cedefi-and-self-sovereign-identity-ssi-work-together-7e49d0e0993a
Alex: From my side it’s about engagement and consistency of marketing.
Marketing is important to make any project a success. Therefore we made our investors, partners and other stakeholders part of our marketing strategy — spreading the message across all channels. Our marketing is largely focused on three main elements:
1. Content development (written, video, webinars etc)
2. Community building
3. Brand awareness
Oh, we’re also running a Meme competition, which will end next Friday. You can send your classic memes, videos, and gifs, total pool prize of 2,000$, so please feel free to participate and send us your entry!
Regarding a large user traffic, we’re working with our self-sovereign identity (SSI) partners, to help them build their solutions on our network and have their users take full advantage of our decentralised solution.
We’re also partnering with DeFi companies like Unizen. In fact we co-wrote a blog post with them.
Participant: What is the most ambitious goal of Cheqd? What is the ultimate vision of Cheqd you are trying to achieve? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any Upcoming Updates?
Ankur: cheqd’s ultimate vision is to become the de-facto payment mechanism for authentic/trusted data regardless of country, industry or underlying technology. All in service of a much greater mission — to give people and companies back their privacy and control of their data.
And, we really mean this. As you can attest, we don’t even have Google Analytics on our website.
Sure, here are some upcoming updates.
Our broad goal is to launch cheqd’s mainnet with the $CHEQ token around October 2021. It will have minimum viable functionality for a stable, production-grade network that offers a new range of functionality for SSI application vendors, digital identity companies, enterprises that need to issue/receive digital credentials, and node operators from a DeFi background.
The two major aims we’ve set ourselves for the next milestone, by the end of September 2021 is to make available:
Define how tokenomics will work on our network: We aim to describe how our cheqd Cosmos network will behave and what the initial economic parameters will be. Sign up to know our tokenomics here: https://www.cheqd.io/l/webinar-tokenomics-2021
Our governance framework for a public-permissionless SSI network: Alex Tweeddale, our Governance & Compliance Lead, introduced the concept of “entropy” in the governance model we aim to construct. This will help to get closer to decentralised governance that gives the community far greater influence on how the cheqd network will run than current permissioned SSI networks allow.
Explanations of architectural decisions that will guide application developers on how to integrate and build against our software.
Once we have achieved a stable Prodnet release, we will continue working on enhancing our network and product with new functionality that expands the possibilities of what use cases self-sovereign identity applications can support. We have exciting ideas here that we will announce as we make our product delivery timelines more concrete.
And here’s our product roadmap
Host: Cheqd is very interesting project, When it’s going to live?
Ankur: We’re aiming for mainnet launch by October 2021
Host: Time for Community Questions:
Participant: Reading your website, I always see the “Sovrin Foundation” on your articles and posts. What kind of relationship do you have with the Sovrin Foundation? Are you partners in some kind? Do you work in tandem to deliver decentralized identity network to your users?
Alex: Hi J mags, please see our FAQs to see your answer regarding Sovrin https://www.cheqd.io/faq
Participant: While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?
Ankur: Yeah absolutely! So for example, we were looking for at what the name for our smallest token unit should be. We worked with the community and settled on nanocheqs as the answer to that.
Broadly, we want the process to be democratic and easy to participate in, and we’ve been working on easy processes to edit and suggest changes.
Participant: NFT is a popular topic right now, do you have plan to have new development regarding NFT? What is your opinion regarding NFT nowaday?
Ankur: great question! NFTs brings up a very interesting concept on identity: how do you know the NFT was minted by the original artist, and not a fake? How do you know the NFT asset — like any another asset you’re buying — is actually going to the real person? (Since a lot of NFTs are very expensive.)
This touches upon a broader idea that identity is super important in a whole RANGE of DeFi use cases
Participant: Can you please highlight more on the decentralization aspect using your technology. Also in the future, is it possible to quantify the level of decentralization and economic incentivization?
Alex: That’s a great question — we’re modelling decentralisation from genesis to sufficient decentralisation using a new concept called Entropy. I’ve written a series of blogs on this — see here:
https://blog.cheqd.io/entropy-in-decentralised-governance-part-one-b6dc2dab0085
Participant: Could you please provide some info about your Roadmap and how Market is progressing so far?
Ankur: Sure! We want to be open and public about this, and having worked in product innovation my goal is to ship early and ship often. We want to be different here, because we see a lot of crypto projects that take years and years before they even release anything and build behind closed doors.
We’ve been making good progress on this: we started in March 2021, and released a private beta testnet by July 2021, and the public beta testnet by August 2021. I’d rather ship early, get feedback, and then iteratively keep improving.
Here’s some context and additional details on where we are on roadmap: https://blog.cheqd.io/cheqds-testnet-is-public-and-we-ve-open-sourced-our-code-4e73e11f1958
Alex: We want to get through more questions! But we’re out for today. Please make sure to:
Join our Telegram Group: https://t.me/cheqd
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cheqd_io
Visit our website: https://www.cheqd.io
Read our blog: https://blog.cheqd.io
Watch our videos: http://cheqd.link/youtube
And, sign up for a cool surprise right after this AMA here: https://www.cheqd.io/l/get-ready
Host: Thank you so much @tweeddalex and @ankurdotb for the very detailed answers!
