Creds: cheqd’s Private & Secure Way to Build Trust and Safeguard Against AI
Creds was announced at the Nebular Summit in Paris today. It is a platform that enables users to create digital credentials, or “creds”, which are secure, privacy-preserving, and portable ways to prove who they are, what they have done, and what they can do.
cheqd is a start-up that aims to create a trusted data economy where users and organizations can control and move their data easily. It is introducing Creds – a platform that allows users to issue, hold and share digital credentials that can be used to verify identity, build a decentralized reputation, and establish trust.
Creds solves some of the key Web3 challenges, such as community security, engagement, trust, the rise of fake content generated by AI, and privacy issues.
Community security, portable trust, and decentralized reputation
Security is one of the biggest challenges in Web3. According to one report, crypto scams cost nearly $150M in a week and created widespread distrust in communities. Creds can help projects verify personhood and ownership of handles, wallets, and reputation, and prove admin and moderator role/status across platforms, such as Discord and Telegram. This can prevent impersonation, Sybil attacks, and scams. Generative AI is making fake content, news, and even people more prevalent, which worsens the problem.
The solution to this problem is trust and reputation. This means that individuals should be able to build their verifiable reputation and carry it over to different communities and platforms. Creds enables this with the added benefit of privacy, where individuals can choose to share one or more credentials for others to verify as authentic.
Community engagement and gamification
Gamification boosts user engagement and attracts and keeps customers. Companies that use gamification make more money than those that don’t. Creds provides a reputation layer to community strategy that allows projects and individuals to experiment with gamification mechanics, such as rewarded quests and learn-to-earn, create distinctive reputation and trust systems, and enhance real engagement.
“More and more organizations are looking to become community-focused to take advantage of the rising community economy. As an example, it’s preferable to have a smaller number of real active community members, or superfans, than to have a group with thousands of bots.”, expands Eduardo Hotta, Head of Marketing & Community at cheqd.
Privacy-preserving
Trust and reputation systems have been attempted with the use of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and SoulBound Tokens (SBTs) with mixed results. Creds are different from NFTs and SBTs, as they are private, revocable, and can be moved to different platforms and ecosystems since all personal data is off-ledger, where it stays private and secure. Data is cryptographically signed and verified by decentralized identifiers (DIDs) on-chain, making it trusted data.
Fraser Edwards, CEO and Co-founder of cheqd explains: “Creds offers a privacy-preserving alternative to the surveillance enabling tech of SBTs and NFTs where you have little control over your privacy, as activities and other information are written on the ledger making it public and immutable. Creds are collectable, portable, secure, and verifiable; it has all the best things that the NFT and SBT have with the addition of everything else they are missing.”
Launch
cheqd started the launch of Creds and its verifiable credentials by giving creds to attendees at the Nebular Summit. Attendees, with their creds, have a verifiable way to show they were at the event, without revealing any personal information about themselves. And, just like an NFT, their creds are collectible and can be stored as a souvenir of the event they attended.
Sebastien Couture, Founder of Nebular Summit and Interop Ventures says: “Our goal for Nebular Summit is to showcase the innovative technology emerging from the interchain ecosystem, and offering credentials to all attendees is a really unique and personalized experience to showcase these innovations. We’re excited to build from this first edition and use them to offer future benefits, like early registration to our events throughout the year.”
About cheqd
cheqd started the launch of Creds and its verifiable credentials by giving creds to attendees at the Nebular Summit. Attendees, with their creds, have a verifiable way to show they were at the event, without revealing any personal information about themselves. And, just like an NFT, their creds are collectible and can be stored as a souvenir of the event they attended.
cheqd (cheqd.io) is a privacy-preserving payment and credential network that enables users and organisations to control and move their data easily. cheqd builds on Decentralised Identity, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), and Digital or Verifiable Credentials (VCs) with payment infrastructure to create Trusted Data markets as a new industry category. In simple terms, you can now issue credentials and get paid for it.
With its technology, cheqd is creating a new paradigm around Trusted Data economies such as lending markets in Web3, preference data markets, and others where the user is at the core. It gives consumers and businesses full ownership, portability, and control over their data and identities. Moreover, this data can be traded within a state-of-the-art payment network that prioritises individual privacy and market-first principles. The scale of distribution is unparalleled as cheqd works with organizations across Lending, Supply Chain, eCommerce, Education, Manufacturing, Gaming and other sectors.
cheqd also has a decentralized reputation platform (creds.xyz) to reward and engage Web3 communities through learning credentials, as well as protect users from fraud and scamming across Discord, Telegram, and beyond.
