In the starting years of Animo Solutions, we had to teach ourselves to celebrate our successes. To take a moment to applaud and toast, to look back, to acknowledge how far we’ve come. You would say that comes natural, but when you’re a small team of achievement-hungry perfectionists, the conversation always turns very quickly to what’s next and what should be improved…
Nowadays, we’re a bit better at it. When there’s a big release, the balloons, decorations, and drinks come out. To continue the good habit, I’d like to take this moment to look back at what we achieved in 2023 before we kick down the door of the new year with our ambitious plans for 2024!
The most important thing we did this year was to actually release Paradym, our solution to the continuing complexity of building decentralised identity solutions. The project started in February 2022, more than 1.5 years ago, as an internal project called ‘ORCA’. From our work at Animo, we had experienced for years how time-consuming and complex it is for people to use verifiable credentials, even if they have the drive, budget and ecosystem. Paradym is our tool to help with this. Any developer with the skill level to use GitHub actions can now set up issuer and verifier flows within hours without having to spend weeks and months on infrastructure.
On September 1st, we gave our waitlist access to the platform in private beta. Only two months later, Paradym completely opened up, enabling everyone to start building using the free tier. Since November, we’ve had 60 people use Paradym and have logged 1432 workflow executions. We’ve been lucky to get quality feedback and requests that enabled our core development team to move incredibly quickly in adding new features and improvements (quick shoutout to our community slack to send in requests or discuss your project).
Paradym launched with support for all foundational verifiable credential actions with the exception of revocation (est. early Q1 2024). Paradym workflows support webhooks and can be executed both in the platform manually and through API calls. Since our launch, the platform has added connectionless issuance and verification and completely overhauled our build & execute flow to make it more user-friendly. A lot of effort went into improving the onboarding and building process. With the addition of templates, developers can now start from a common issuer, holder or verifier template and edit them to reflect their use case. Even starting from scratch has been improved, as we’ve improved the workflow editor to offer more assistance during building and reduce how much the Paradym docs have to be consulted. We’re working steadily on our two main goals: improve the UX based on the initial experiences and support the most requested identity standards and features. Next up on our list? OpenID, revocation, and Trust Registries.
Although we got a lot of work done and are very proud of the results, we also encountered plenty of setbacks. The main one, that is immediately the most characteristic to the decentralized identity space, is that we started to build the platform with DIDComm and AnonCreds. The SSI and decentralized identity space moves so quickly however, that suddenly it seemed the whole world was shifting to OpenID. The choice became to launch with DIDComm and AnonCreds, or to wait until we'd added support for OpenID (something we already intended, but not this soon). In the end we decided that launching quickly was more important, and to add support for other standards as quickly as possible. In the end it all worked out and we expect to support OpenID in Q1 2024.
With the public launch of Paradym, we focused from the very beginning on making it accessible for developers exploring verifiable credentials. We’ve created three ‘How to Build’ video tutorials that show the versatility of the platform and enable you to code along!
- Jan Rietveld shows you how to issue and verify education course credentials and integrate your web application with Paradym
- Timo Glastra showcases how you can build a chatbot feature over DIDComm using the new basic messaging that was added to Paradym and chatGPT
- Karim Stekelenburg demonstrates how to use Paradym for gamification purposes to issue and verify achievement credentials
We also hosted a live building session and Q&A. The next session is already scheduled for 2024, so keep an eye on our YouTube channel to explore Paradym together and discuss your use case or implementation!
Also, in 2023, the Paradym wallet was both built and published in app stores. This was especially exciting as we’ve been talking about making a clean, straightforward, no-frills identity wallet for ages. We finally got the chance to do so in a collaborative event surrounding OpenID support and interop. It’s free and open source and, in our opinion, an excellent base for people who are starting from scratch with their identity wallet (or are considering spending a large amount of money) to accelerate their timeline.
So, to say we’ve had an eventful year would be an understatement… We’ve kicked Paradym off with a bang, and I promise you that we are only going to continue that momentum into 2024!
My deepest gratitude goes out to the whole Animo team, you’ve been extraordinary this year (as you have been the previous years). My greatest joy is creating awesome things together with you all.
To an excellent 2024! May it bring even more adventures, triumphs, and challenges we never saw coming 😉🚀🛠️ .
Ana Goessens
CEO, Animo Solutions
