Alarm bells should be going off when total addressable market estimates are performed by the company targeting the market and when the estimate isn’t specific regarding what’s being measured, and this article suggests Cheqd failed both tests. It is the latter issue that makes it almost impossible to combine research from multiple sources. Mercator published a prepaid taxonomy that defined how we conducted our prepaid research and how we defined each prepaid segment, in the hopes that it would be followed by others so that multiple research efforts could be compared and combined. Without a specific definition of what is being measured and what isn’t, the TAM results are relatively useless:
“It is hard to know what to make of a new white paper that values the total addressable market for self-sovereign identification at $550 billion annually.
The report was funded by cheqd, a startup building networks on which to securely exchange digital ID data. It was also co-written by cheqd’s CEO, Fraser Edwards, and a cheqd marketing and communications advisor.
Its conclusions are based on a meta-analysis of dozens of third-party reports and articles, but the collection feels cherrypicked to produce big numbers. The result feels a little squishy. For instance, the authors never say whether the market value that they arrive at is global.
Many supporting statistics about submarkets involve worldwide assumptions and totals so it is safe to assume that the $550 billion total is global as well. But other points are similarly vague or obscured by too many figures.”
Mercator recognizes that self-sovereign identity is being baked into the internet infrastructure and we have several reports available on the topic.
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group