Decentralized identity and trust infrastructure provider cheqd has joined forces with The Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance to implement verifiable credentials and cryptographic identity checks for AI agents across its ecosystem, the teams announced Friday.
The partnership targets the growing identity crisis in the AI agent landscape, where increasingly autonomous and persuasive agents are being rapidly adopted — 25% of enterprises using generative AI are expected to use AI agents by 2025, rising to 50% by 2027, with the market projected to grow from $5.3–5.7 billion to $47.1 billion by 2030, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Predictions Report.
Yet despite this growth, there is still no standard way to verify who or what they truly represent. As a result, users are left vulnerable to impersonation, fraud, and manipulation.
cheqd and The ASI Alliance aim to address this with a set of cheqd-powered decentralized verification tools, including decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and Trust Registries.
These will be integrated across the ASI ecosystem, enabling over 20 projects built on ASI infrastructure, including TrueAGI, Rejuve.AI, SophiaVerse, and SingularityVenturesHub, to issue on-chain verifiable identities for their AI agents.
“As AI agents begin acting independently across industries, trust in their identity is non-negotiable. By embedding decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and Trust Registries into ASI1 and Agentverse. We’re enabling agent-based systems to perform and standardize cryptographic authentication and establish trust relationships at scale,” said Fraser Edwards, cheqd’s co-founder.
How it works
When an organization or individual deploys an AI agent on the ASI Alliance’s infrastructure, that agent is automatically assigned a Decentralized Identifier (DID). This DID acts as a unique, tamper-proof digital fingerprint for the agent, anchored on-chain for transparency and permanence. It ensures that no two agents share the same identity and that each can be distinctly recognized across platforms.
The creator of the agent can then issue a verifiable credential linked to the agent’s DID. This credential serves as a cryptographic certificate that confirms the agent’s authorization to act on behalf of the issuer. It is digitally signed using the issuer’s private key, enabling anyone to independently verify its authenticity and origin without needing to trust a centralized authority.
Cheqd’s Trust Registry stores cryptographic references to verifiable credentials. By recording only essential metadata instead of full credentials, it enables users to verify who issued a credential, what type it is, and whether it remains valid or has been revoked.
All of this happens behind the scenes. End users won’t need to understand blockchain or handle cryptographic keys. When they interact with an AI agent, the underlying system automatically verifies the agent’s identity and authorization.
This approach enables scalable, privacy-preserving trust in AI systems, making it possible to authenticate autonomous agents in real-time while maintaining decentralization, transparency, and security.
