CheckD: The world’s first (self sovereign) data wallet
Empowering Communities
For a while now, we have been experimenting and learning with a type of product that would empower communities and enable individuals and businesses to co-create value and thrive with their social and cultural identities.
Businesses tend to live in verticals: Healthcare, Finance, Education, Transportation. But lived lives do not sit in verticals. Individuals connect between businesses and create value in their lives by travelling along the “horizontals”. Just going to work involves Touchpoints in F&B (getting breakfast), Finance (buying a ticket), Transportation (train or bus), Media (watching the news), Entertainment (listening to music). These “horizontals” are the “journeys” in our lives. Whether we are commuting to work, getting a mortgage, going on holiday or improving our skills, as individuals we live our lives in the “horizontals” through such journeys. In the digital world, our journeys should be supported by conveniences such as being able to digitally validate our nut allergies, present evidence of our income or transfer our health records from one hospital to another. These conveniences, technologically possible in a digital world, should connect us and organizations seamlessly. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened. Using data between siloed vertical systems – and ensuring this is done safely and securely – is too complex for centralized technologies. It is clear now that they cannot achieve this.
We have chosen to simplify that complexity by using a different infrastructure. An infrastructure where data (yes, even those created at the centre) can be pushed to the “edge” to be used and to create value, connecting with multiple apps and services. Data at the edge is fully distributed – owned by individuals, organizations and governments. This edge data infrastructure can create special rules and “lanes” for the use of different types of data. The simplification of data governance can now finally allow the “horizontal” economy of multiple customer journeys to manifest itself.
This is the vision of the CheckD data wallet platform. With CheckD, anyone who wants to create a community can create a “badge”. This badge can be an ID affiliated to your community, an activity that is verified at a Touchpoint, an achievement that can be awarded, or just the customers within your app. Once the badges are created, they can be put together to form journeys that go across multiple firms, verifying identity, validating activities and even transferring data. The simplicity of data governance at the edge, we believe, would drive the edge markets for the use of many different types of information. Businesses, clubs, communities and even countries can create badges and fill them with information to support multiple conveniences in country and abroad. Data at the edge is similar to data on phones or laptops. It can travel with individuals to create value across borders, fully compliant with data regulation.
The CheckD data wallet doesn’t just do badges, journeys, verifications and validations. It is also able to generate “zero knowledge” audiences of attributes along the journeys, enabling such audiences to be discoverable, and inviting offers by other firms to be placed against different badges in the data wallet. This audience-targeting feature is powerful; it can create personalization within the wallet, and yet preserves the privacy of individuals.
The CheckD data wallet can be embedded in any app/website or a vertical system, similar to a payment wallet, powering existing digital systems with a competitive advantage and new revenue streams. Ecosystems can now be created to interoperate between centralized apps and across borders. We look forward to supporting these systems in breaking out of their siloes with the power of the edge. However, we are not doing this alone. The CheckD team partners with marketing companies, consultancies and digital agencies – creativity powerhouses that will use CheckD to help issuers design badges and journeys that would drive engagement and empowerment.
CheckD data wallet is open for early access from mid-June 2024. Learn more at https://dataswyft.com/checkd and enquire about early access.
Further reading: “Edge Markets for the Usage of Data and Digital Assets: The Dataswyft Data Wallet” is a White Paper on the Dataswyft data wallets that powers CheckD. This paper will be presented at the International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy (CADE 2024), 24th - 26th June 2024 in Venice, Italy.