AMA with Cheqd

Introduction with Cheqd

Jannat:
Q1. What is cheqd about and what is its mission?

Elina:
We’re on a mission to give people and organisations back their privacy and control of their data through self-sovereign identity (SSI). SSI is an emerging concept for exchanging authentic and trusted data related to people, companies, and things in a much more secure and privacy-preserving way.

This is why we're building a blockchain network with a dedicated token to make SSI commercially viable. By introducing payments and other sustainable economic incentives, we can turbocharge the adoption of SSI, return control and privacy to individuals, and enable new business models for trusted data.

The RHS is self-sovereign idenitty and it what we’re building our network to support

Fraser:
And this is what we're building, the network and payment rails for self-sovereign identity

Jannat:
🔥

Fraser:
Simply, we're creating the payment rails for you to get your data back

Jannat:
Gotcha!

Fraser:
Perfect example was facebooks outage last night, loads of people got locked out of accounts (through login with fqcebook) because they hoard all of that data, we want to change that

And give it back to you!

Hope that makes sense, done ;)

Jannat:
It does

Don't forget to join everyone!!

So next one

Q2. Can you shed some light on the features of the identity network cheqd is going to launch?

I’d say the bit at the bottom is a great visual guide, we’re providing all the base capabilities for digitral identity, but also governance and payment rails.

Fraser:
And we're also creating customisable commercial models (we're really enthusiastic about these) so that each identity use case/ ecosystem / industry can create their own commercial and incentive models

Elina:
We’ve recently published our tokenomics mechanics focusing on governance – this already sheds some light on how the network will operate. Read here: https://blog.cheqd.io/cheqds-tokenomics-for-ssi-explained-f13f680cf00d

Fraser:
And a key thing, there's no identity information on the ledger, all of that goes peer-to-peer to keep your activity private

Jannat:
Sounds great! 😍

Q3. Who are the major partners backing/investing in cheqd?

Fraser:
Great question! This twitter thread has all the names:
https://twitter.com/fraser_again/status/1440971937333792770?s=20

Jannat:
Check out everyone

Fraser:
But to list some key ones!
Evernym - godfathers of SSI
Outlier ventures
Block Unify
Titanblock
3GR
Hidden Muse
Dion capital
Skyvision
exnetwork
bixinventures
AW3L
Necker
Factblock
Grizzly
DoublePeak and Kredit ventures

In no particular order by the way!

And then some amazing angels who've been with us since the start

Jannat:
So many good names I can see

Fraser:
Oh and we have one to announce soon which is big for us

Jannat:
Please do

Fraser:
Of course! follow us and you'll get to find out who it is!

Jannat:
Ahha! Stay tuned people!

Q4. How can we acquire $CHEQ token and what is its role ?

Elina:
Here's the best place: https://t.me/cheqd

Fraser:
So, we're looking to be launched in the next month or so, so watch out for us! We just got ourselves onto coinmarket cap yesterday so we're setting up to get launched!

As for it's role, our tokenomics blog is the best place for that!

Jannat:
Can we have it here

Elina:
And as mentioned earlier our recent tokenomics blog will be a great resource to understand how our token will work. Read here: https://blog.cheqd.io/cheqds-tokenomics-for-ssi-explained-f13f680cf00d

Fraser:
Two definite routes are Osmosis and Gravity DEX and we have applications to a bunch of exchanges moving

Jannat:
Awesome

To break it down quickly:
- Staking
- Governance (i.e. voting)
- Paying for identity writes (DIDs, schemas, definitions)
- But longer term payments for data being moved around

Fraser:
And we want to make loads of payment modules available with the token, these are listed on the RHS here

Jannat:
Q5. Can you tell us about what are you guys focusing on delivering further in this year ?

Fraser:
Oh I should have kept the roadmap for now!

Our main main focus is launching inside the next 2 months, after that it’s going to be a huge case of building, both on the identity functionality but also the payments sides

Fraser:
Here's a bit of a further out vision of where we're going!

Elina:
Beyond this we will be working with our SSI vendors to bring help onboard them to the cheqd network and support in building their customisable commercial models using the pluggable tokenomics enabled by the Cosmos.

Fraser:
It's really, launching then expanding!!

Also, we're looking to work with the community in a big way so if there's something you want to see, let us know! We want to hear from you!

Help us shape our roadmap and direction

Jannat:
Goooottt iittt!!!!!

Community ask questions from Twitter

Jannat:
1. Community leaders appear to be in charge of a lot,including defining and enforcing Cheqd's rules. 
So, how are these leaders chosen and nominated?
What criteria do they employ to choose them?

Twitter question from @sunnyaremu

Fraser:
Great, great question!

The following applies for the entire team, not just community leaders. We're very very lucky that our team alignment is incredible. Now, what does that look like?

- Everyone in the team believes in the new paradigm (SSI) and giving people back their data and privacy. We come at it from different directions / angles but all believe in it.
- Every person has a strong moral compass and stands behind it.
- We're also collaborative, we work well together and are pretty seamless despite it only being 6 months together, and around 2 months for some.

So we've been assessing those qualities in others

To give an example of that alignment, myself and Ankur wrote down a brand mission when it was just the two of us.

We did the same activity with Eduardo and Javed when they joined and found we didn't need to change it. Going for principles and personalities seems to be paying off!

Jannat:
#teamwork

Fraser:
Exactly!

Jannat:
2. Your website claims that you can be trusted because you protect people's data and keep to your commitments by going 'the extra mile'
So, how far above the call of duty are you willing to go?

Twitter username @Karljay009

Fraser:
Love the focus of these questions on team, we've never had these before!

A lot of this "doing the right thing" and feeling we're operating ethically. Given we're dealing with personal data and money, we need to be ethical, moral and do the right thing.

In our interviews with both Javed and Toby, they both mentioned they wanted to build something that changed the world for the positive and be able to sleep at night. We won't be another facebook.

I'd say the other part is we work. hard. We've built an entire network inside 6 months, there aren't many others that can match us there.

Elina:
One of the examples that we live by our principles within the marketing domain, is is that we, for example, don't use Google Analytics.

Jannat:
Lol facebook is facing hard troll

Fraser:
Ahaha, especially after last night!

Jannat:
Agreed

3.Cheqd claims to make it easy for people and businesses to trust one another. 
Can you elucidate the details of this claim? 
How exactly do you intend to accomplish this?

Twitter question from @Josephayoola19

Elina:
We’re building the trusted/authentic data economy to create solutions and business models, where verifiable credentials are exchanged in a trusted, reusable, safer, and cheaper way than ever before. Essentially, it gives people and organisations control of their data, speeds up and significantly reduces costs of identity checks.

To enable our vision, we’re leveraging self-sovereign identity (SSI). SSI is a method of identity that makes the control of the information centred around its owner. Unlike the existing system, it's a user-centric and user-controlled approach to exchange authentic information in a much more secure way.

Watch more about what SSI is – explained in 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9f36Sh4CFM

Fraser:
Self-sovereign identity really is the key here.

The way businesses and people trust each other right now is by checking paper documents. We had to do some of this the other day and one of our team used an expired passport by accident and no-one checked, so the system is broken.

It's why there is so so much fraud

Instead, we're moving all the data to be digital and cryptographically signed so it can be trusted

That means less fraudulent documents and more easy trust

Plus, it removes the need for companies to take in more data than they want. For example, why does a bouncer or a store need to see your address on your driving license when you're buying a beer? It doesn't, SSI allows them to only ask for and receive the data they need to offer you services

Bit of a winding answer but we're making SSI successful and that is built to establish trust between people and organisations

Jannat:
Lol +1 to the example

#perfecto!

Community ask questions from Website

Jannat:
1. Cheqd says People do not understand what governance is, or why it is important, and that is why Governance Frameworks are generally perceived as largely inaccessible documents. So can you tell us what governance really is??

Telegram username @stephesonfresh

Fraser:
Also, this is the best set of questioons we've seen in any AMAs we've done so far!

Jannat:
Thanks 🙈

From the community ;)

Elina:
Essentially governance lays out the ways that participants on the cheqd Network are able to make proposals, vote and influence the direction of change on the network, in a democratic way.

Fraser:
Shame we don't have Alex here!

Governance is setting rules and standards that people abide by and follow. Most models of governance rely on a hierarchical structure, where a sovereign authority regulates from a top-down perspective. For example, a national government is responsible for setting laws and enforcing them on the public. This makes sense because, without a level of prescribed governance to keep the public in check, order would descend into anarchy.

At cheqd, we like to think about Governance as constituting 4 parts:

1. Law and guidelines
2. Principles and social norms
3. Markets and economy
4. Architecture

Elina:
On that note, our governance lead Alex Tweeddale wrote an amazing series of blogs that explore entropy in decentralised governance, which explains the governance principles in details. The lest peace specifically looks into cheque’s governance. Take a look here: https://blog.cheqd.io/entropy-in-decentralised-governance-part-three-4d86b158b9b9

Jannat:
2. Use of unsuitable or non-inclusive language is anexample of unacceptable behavior on the Cheqdnetwork. 
What languages does cheqd support at the moment, and does this imply that Cheqd is only available locally?

Telegram username @KaptinBlack

Fraser:
By inclusive we mean welcoming, non-offensive language. So no insulting anyone, no racism, sexism, etc.

The docs and framework are currently in english but we hppe as this grows they are translated into other language. And the same for our communities. we truly want to be globa

global*

Elina:
SSI doesn’t have any borders as we give people back their privacy. That’s why we have the ambitious plans to localise the brand and grow our communities in the local languages making it available for each and everyone.

Again stay tuned for these announcements in our TG group: https://t.me/cheqd

Jannat:
Stay tuned everyone!!

3. When you mention implementing payments on your website, do you mean managing when, to whom, with what, and how much users pay for their subscriptions and services? Or what payment mechanism are you introducing?

Telegram username @ISvspect

Fraser:
Ah, great question

So we’re not looking to prescribe the payments but make the smart contracts and the payments available to each ecosystem so they can configure them

Fraser:
So ike this

Jannat:
Great answers so far

Like questions answered by Cheqd

1)Temitope Awoyinka:
✨💥💫✨

Can you please elaborate more on the uses of SSI in Crypto world, how does this affect and benefits crypto users ?

And is this project decentralized and global, do you have a governance token, can users partake in the governance of this project ?

Fraser:
Absolutely, this is one of the areas we can;'t wait to fix, both for DeFi but also NFTs:

- Crypto & DeFi:
- Re-usable KYC, so doing KYC once and then being able to re-use it across exchanges, IDO platforms, nft marketplaces etc
- p2p transfers / payments where you can share a small piece of identity info (like a TG handle) to prove who you are, but without anyone knowing, so no more test payments to check wallets
- Doing KYC'd loan pools without needing to store the data, only storing yes or no answers, like "do you live outside the US?"

- NFTs:
- Proving who created, owned, currently owns NFTs across their lifecycle as well as providing ownership of fractions.

But crucially we see SSI working with DeFi in different ways, like, once you have a recurring revenue stream for identity, you can then tokenise that and create new secondary markets for that identity. Like being able to own a fraction of a celebrity's signature and getting a payment whenever they use it.

2)Ana Manzano:
Have any SSI companies already implemented the use of the business models that Cheqd offers? If so, could you tell us what they would be? but really when will the launch of your products?

Fraser:
Very good question! We're not actually live yet so that would be a bit difficult but we're building out a great group of partners to take advantage of what we're building.

We already have danubetech, spherity, evernym and a few others onboard and are massively expanding that group. Here are the groups Toby, our head of partnerships, is planning to work with:

1. Self-Sovereign Identity vendors (who will also light up nodes on our network) - we've already onboarded onto testnet our GTM partner and market leading SSI vendor Evernym, and also key SSI vendor DIDx. We're currently onboarding other influential SSI vendors: DIDx, DanubeTech, Tykn, Trinsic, Esatus, ContinuumLoop, Randa Solutions, Condatis, Dhiway, EarthID, Crucible Network, Convergence. SSI partnerships in our scope once we achieve critical mass: Jolocom, Mavennet, Transmute, Mattr, Affinidi and many more SSI players.

3. In the Crypto space - we have notable partnerships with Unizen, CeDefi Alliance around how cheqd can help CeFi and DeFi merge as the risky nature of CeDeFi transfers has been holding back many institutional users. Institutional participation is an influential driver for mass adoption, and the introduction of SSI through cheqd of that level can result in significant growth of decentralised finance. Our crypto alliances pipeline is forming with Cosmos Cash for joint development and we're in advanced discussions with Sonar, Curio, Blocto, Mintable, Source, and many more forming daily (we’re just getting started!) about how SSI can benefit the DeFi ecosystem.

4. Enterprise partnerships and Implementation partners: Moodie Davitt - largest publisher in the airline / airport industry globally. We're also creating interesting partnership models all over the world to make sure our ecosystem grows rapidly!

3)J Mags:
Cheqd and Unizen has established partnership to deal with the problems regarding both CeFi and DeFi. What are you proposed solutions and activities to combine and two fields of finance? What products does Cheqd has to unify these two ideas?

Elina:
CeDeFi (Unizen) is a strong application for Self-Sovereign Identity as finance remains the biggest, and potentially the most rewarding challenge for SSI and cheqd’s network. By partnering with Unizen, cheqd can enter a perfect market for SSI as neither decentralised nor centralised finance is satisfied with current options for KYC, and identity. SSIs create a bridge between traditional data-heavy interactions and an anonymous DeFi approach and CeDeFI will provide the financial infrastructure for SSI adoption in a key market.

As cheqd’s ultimate vision is to establish the payment rails for identity, initially self-sovereign identity without anyone needing to worry about the underlying technology, this perfectly aligns with the CeDeFi vision of providing a spectrum of financial services without the need to worry about whether they are centralised, decentralised or what technology they are built on. The blending of CeFi and DeFi also prevents the need for multiple, siloed identities which is exactly the problem SSI is built to solve. Hence a strong partnership with untold future applications and value creation as the cheqd network will enable SSI payment rails and partnerships that benefit both cheqd and unizens ecosystems and position cheqd to solve this complex challenge for both CeFI and DeFi.

4)Md Ridoy Mahamud🌷🌷🌷:
Can you explain how is your Tokenomics Distribution/How many tokens Will be minted. And How many tokens Will be locked by the team./????

Fraser:
We've had a few requests for this. We'll be releasing this in the next couple of weeks as we head out to launch.

If you're following us on twitter or TG you'll see this announced very soon!

Plus, we need to get it out as we'll be live extremely soon!