Overview
EchoForge (founded 2026 by Charles Tao) is a small Cardano studio building infrastructure tools for the ecosystem. It is the umbrella brand over a family of products rather than a single app, and the products share two things: an identity layer called EchoID that holds each user's profile, and a reputation system called ForgeCard that tracks how much someone uses the apps.1
The Echo family covers four products. EchoCert lets organizations issue digital certificates that are permanently saved on Cardano, with a free public lookup so anyone can confirm a record is real.1 EchoUploader anchors a permanent fingerprint of any file on Cardano so its authorship and existence can be verified later, without uploading the file itself.2 EchoDash is a wallet-connected dashboard that shows a user's EchoID profile, ForgeCard tier, ADA spending, and ecosystem activity in one place. EchoVote is in development and will handle on-chain governance and community voting. EchoCert, EchoUploader, and EchoDash are live; EchoVote is in progress. The studio's smart contracts are written in Aiken, target Plutus v3, and are published as open source under the Apache 2.0 license.3
Key Features
- A shared identity layer. EchoID is the profile that follows a user across the Echo apps, so signing in once is enough to use any of them without rebuilding a profile each time.
- Certificates anyone can verify. EchoCert turns each credential into a permanent on-chain record and gives every certificate an ID, so the recipient owns the record and anyone can check it on a free public lookup page.1
- File proof without uploading the file. EchoUploader writes a permanent fingerprint of a file to Cardano (roughly 0.17 ADA per anchor, in personal and organization modes) so its authorship and existence can be proven later, while the file itself stays with the owner.2
- One dashboard for your activity. EchoDash is a wallet-connected view that displays your EchoID profile, ForgeCard tier progression, ADA spending, and ecosystem activity scores together. It shows EchoID; it is not the identity layer itself.
- Open-source smart contracts. The Cardano validators (the EchoCert minting policy and the DocuMint document anchor policy) are published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.3
- A reputation tier built in. ForgeCard tracks how often someone uses EchoForge apps, and the resulting tiers are surfaced in EchoDash and can unlock discounts on paid features.
- Choice of wallet. Every EchoForge app connects to five popular Cardano wallets (Eternl, Nami, Flint, Vespr, and Lace) through MeshJS, a Cardano developer toolkit, so users can keep using the wallet they already know.1
What to Expect
The EchoForge site is stark black-and-white and presents the studio as an umbrella over the Echo product family. EchoCert is live: it asks for the recipient name, issuing organization, issue date, and template style, then connects a Cardano wallet to issue the certificate.1 EchoUploader is live and lets a user connect a wallet and anchor a file's fingerprint on Cardano for a small per-anchor ADA fee.2 EchoDash is live and still being completed, with several planned features rolling out. EchoVote has a product page marked in development. The interface is available in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese.
