There's quite a few "Layer 1" identity chains:.
30 Mar 2023, 05:29
There’s quite a few “Layer 1” identity chains:
- Polkadot ecosystem (Kilt, Dock), - Hyperledger Indy ecosystem (Sovrin, Indicio, IDunion),
- Polygon (Polygon ID)
- Cardano ecosystem (RootsID)
- Cosmos ecosystem (NYM tech, hypersign, and of course ourselves at cheqd)
- Ethereum / Hyperleder Besu (Velocity Network, Verus)
You also have the likes of:
- Civic (looking more at KYC)
- Ontology (focussing more on wallets)
However, a lot of these chains just support basic DIDs and are largely trying to do similar things.
Many of these companies are looking at NFTs, DAOs and following general hype trains.
To our knowledge, no other chain is doing payment rails for Verifiable Credentials using a token. I won’t comment on the utility of other projects’ tokens, but I have not come across anything similar to cheqd.
I wouldn’t be surprised if companies began copying our approach once payment rails are launched, for example, Cardano are already trying to follow our DID-Linked Resources approach to support AnonCreds.
The closest to us in terms of payments would probably be Velocity Network who, to my knowledge, are looking at doing a bespoke payment infrastructure using on-ledger credentials - which in my opinion and having spoken to them is really bad for GDPR and privacy.
Kilt also initially had the idea to do this but have since pivoted towards other focus.
So ultimately, I am not aware of any serious direct competitors at the moment - other projects would likely be complimentary rather than in direct competition at the moment to cheqd.
In the future, if we do see more direct competition in terms of payment rails, I also don’t see it as a bad thing. As, (a) the market is large enough; and (b) we’re confident that we can do things better than anyone else with our team’s expertise.
Hope this helps ❤️