Introducing Paradym! 🚀⚡️🙌 After more than a year of thinking, prototyping and building, we're so proud to be launching Paradym, our answer to the question "Why is building decentralized identity solutions so damn hard?".
Animo Solutions has, since its founding in 2020, been a development and consultancy party, primarily for other SSI vendors and government parties. We’re mostly known for our open-source work and our role as maintainers of Aries Framework JavaScript. We have previously built and released free and open-source developer tools like Siera Desktop & CLI, as well as the Animo SSI demo that is meant to help anyone understand self-sovereign identity. This year, however, we made a big change. We launched Paradym, a product with a larger aim than ever before: to make verifiable credentials as easy to use as any other technology out there.
So now, after years of experience as a tech partner and service provider, we are taking a step in the product direction. In this piece, I’d like to go into a bit of the how and why of creating Paradym.
Animo Solutions was founded by Karim Stekelenburg, Timo Glastra, and Ana Goessens. We met as students of Software Engineering in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and quickly rose in the digital identity ecosystem. Animo specializes in open-source, usability on every level, and quality, and as our expertise grew, so did our amazing team!
In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital identity verification, we recently found ourselves at a crossroads. At Animo Solutions, we love working on the most complex, low-level building blocks of decentralized digital identity. The problems that get us excited are the kind of problems that require us to write Request for Comments (RFCs) and argue with about three other developers worldwide who are very (very) invested in the outcome. We have gotten used to writing and then immediately implementing new specs and growing our tech stack one module or library at a time. That excitement and drive are what initially shaped Animo and the work we do there.
But as we have gathered more experience and now work increasingly with knowledgeable and competent clients, we have gotten increasingly impatient with what we can actually offer. People come to us already wanting to use the tech (what a luxury). They come to us looking to build identity wallets, issuer platforms, and verification systems, full of excitement about their plans and use cases! But with all our expertise, we often have to be the ones raining on their parade.
We’ve looked at your idea, and we can definitely do it, but….
- Your current codebase is not compatible with what’s out there
- Somewhere in the world, someone is working on that feature, but it has been neglected and is basically on hold forever
- It will take months, and it will cost thousands
What we love doing is creating valuable, tangible output, but most of the time, our client’s projects stay in endless development. As we have become more deeply involved in every level of the decentralized identity market, we now recognize the challenges faced by businesses, start-ups, and governments. Our collective goal has become to make using verifiable credentials easier to use and easier to say yes to. Why should choosing verifiable credentials not work the same way any other tool, tech, or trend works? That’s why we created Paradym. So, we could use our hard-earned expertise to make something that enables other builders, visionaries, and idea-havers to simply create.
That drive led to Paradym, our low-code identity workflow builder. Inspired by the simplicity and customization options of GitHub actions. Paradym abstracts away all of the complexities of decentralized digital identity development and leaves you with straightforward actions to combine, mix, and customize. We’ve tested the platform by recreating previous development projects that took months and accomplished them in less than a day. With Paradym, we believe we’ve created the perfect tool to quickly and efficiently achieve results.
There's a lot of learning still ahead. We believe that the moment for mainstream adoption of verifiable credentials has come, but it is still not 100% clear what it will look like. Our aim with Paradym is to dive headfirst into this new period and support all builders that are currently or in the near future, discovering the incredible potential of decentralized identity technology. The platform will soon be extended with an action marketplace and the ability to create custom actions, in order to become a meeting place for all builders to collaborate, exchange and build on each others work.
We're incredibly excited for everything that is coming, and are looking forward to building the future of identity together.
