Paradym's sole purpose is to make it easier, faster, and cheaper for builders to use verifiable credentials in their solutions. As the platform is now both launched 🙌🍾 and open to anyone 🛠️🧑🏽💻, our focal point becomes usability. Usability in terms of making Paradym as pleasant as possible to use but also just actually usable in that it fits builders' use cases and requirements.
This year, we are making Paradym the number-one choice for digital identity builders. In this article, we dive into our goals for 2024 regarding features, users, and impact. As always, if there are any crucial plans we're obviously missing, join the Paradym Community and let us know!
⚡️ Expanding Standards Support
There's a lot of technical terms going around in this industry, and currently those terms are mostly focused on what standards will be supported by whom. What's important to know is that although different credentials standards have different roots and are favoured in different parts of the world, in the end they all allow you to do one thing: prove stuff.
Paradym launched only with support for AnonCreds but with the intention to support all current major 'players' in terms of standards. Although the road to it is long, we're making some significant steps with Paradym in 2024. Within Q1, the platform and wallet will support OpenID for Verifiable Credentials (OpenID4VC) and Selective Disclosure Json Web Tokens (SD-JWT).
Now that the standards and interoperability discussion is shifting from purely technical working groups to governmental bodies, we are keeping a close eye on developments in Europe, Canada, and the USA. With Paradym, we have decided to implement in parallel, meaning we will not wait around until definitive versions of various specification are released, but we are implementing as we go based on current knowledge. For example, within Q1, Paradym will add support for a subset of the specifications described in the European Architecture Reference Framework. Later in the year, we'll add support for mDL (the standard for the mobile drivers license) as well. Once this guideline undoubtedly changes, to become the finally adopted European Digital Identity Framework Regulation, we will make adjustments to be compliant with that.
Why do we do this and risk wasting time? Our loyalty lies with the builders who want to get ahead and start with what is already there instead of waiting on what will be there. In the past years, we have seen firsthand how much can be achieved by starting, doing, and building, even when, afterwards, some things need to be adjusted.
Besides Europe, where a lot of formal steps are currently happening, we are also keeping a close eye on the incredible progress being made in both Canada (who are building a lot using AnonCreds and W3C Verifiable Credentials, two open standards for implementing verifiable credentials) and the USA (where W3C Verifiable Credentials and mDL seem to have the preference). Even though no country-wide announcements have been made, Paradym will follow indications and build in parallel for anyone who is working to launch their solution sooner rather than later.
An added benefit of expanding our supported standards is that it will become easier to use the platform with any identity wallet. Currently, the Paradym wallet is pretty much the only suitable wallet, but as more standards are supported the gap to use your custom wallet should become smaller.
⚡️ Revocation
The Paradym team is working on adding revocation to the platform at this very moment. It will be usable for anyone within Q1. With revocation added, all the major features of a mature verifiable credential application are supported in the platform, and we will be moving out of open beta and into stable release.
⚡️ Teams
Currently, organization users have to share their Paradym account or create separate accounts. Early Q1 this will not be the case anymore as we're adding teams to the platform. Teams are obviously useful if you're collaborating on a project, but they will also help with creating different environments for different users or projects.
⚡️ User Collaboration
We've had the place to ourselves for long enough, implementing what we deemed important and fine-tuning in the direction we wanted. Now it's time to open Paradym up for community collaboration!
There are several plans for this in 2024. First of all, within Q1, there will be a first very limited version of the Paradym Marketplace. Within Paradym you build your custom workflow by combining actions from the action library. The Marketplace will be a place where people can create and share their own custom-built actions with the community, for anyone to use while building workflows. In Q1, this will entail being able to use actions for common platforms like Slack and Discord. Depending on the interest in the Marketplace, we expect to grow it in Q2 with an action and template builder and enable independent community interaction.
Secondly, we'll be helping builders... well... build. One of the main reasons for creating Paradym is that we are done with how long projects stay in the explorative phase. Either because knowledge has to be built up, implementation takes long, or the cost of building needs to be justified first. We want to enable builders to get to production as fast as possible and make sure that using verifiable credentials is not a blocker to anyone's roadmap. In Q1 and Q2, we'll be giving away free consultancy to selected projects to prove that Paradym is the best choice to get your solution out in the world quickly (to pitch your project, email our CEO ana@animo.id directly). In Q3, we are also planning a public hackathon and partnering with businesses to build tangible solutions to their digital identity issues.
Finally, we will spend 2024 expanding our community interaction through the community Slack, builder showcases, and more interactive building sessions, in order to directly hear and implement ideas from the builders that use Paradym.
⚡️ Trust Registries
A significant milestone for large-scale adoption and implementation of verifiable credential solutions is the support of trust registries. A trust registry is a pretty straightforward concept. It is a list of issuers and/or verifiers that are authorized to issue or verify certain credentials. Think of government-accredited universities, insurance-approved hospitals, and any other place where it is collected who to trust. Currently, new frameworks are emerging for trust registries in the new digital identity landscape. In 2024, we want to enable Paradym builders to use existing or custom-built registries. We're starting research and architecture design for supporting and interacting with Trust Registries in Q2 and implementing in Q3.
⚡️ On-Premise Deployments
Paradym is currently already built to scale to large numbers of transactions; Paradym's infrastructure is built with auto-scaling, where more instances are automatically added when the load is higher (by the way, we're also exploring a Kubernetes setup to improve our scalability further). However, a lot of use cases we've encountered that require require that amount of scaling also require on-premise deployments. That's why we're already researching on-premise deployments currently in Q1 and will take steps to enable this for select customers in Q2. Whether it will become a default option is dependent on the results of the custom deployments for these select customers.
⚡️ Pay by usage
Payment-wise, it is all about the action executions in Paradym. We have decided to make pricing as straightforward as possible by not charging different amounts for different ledger interactions. Instead, there is an amount of action executions that are determined by your pricing tier. There are four tiers in the platform, Free, Showcase, Pro and Custom. While the free tier and showcase tier are both suitable for smaller amounts of transactions, the Free tier enables any builder to build their PoC on testnet while the Showcase tier (€20) is meant for building and showcasing your solution directly on production networks. More intensive use cases are suited to the Pro tier (€100) and Custom tier.
What we want to create is an environment where Paradym is the best choice for you as you grow your solution and user base. So it might be the best fit to start for free, and as you grow to your million-user successful business, we grow right along with you. Recently, we have been thinking that pay-by-usage pricing would fit that purpose better. If we remove the tiers and enable builders to increase their executions continually, as they need it, instead of in steps, Paradym could always be the right fit pricing-wise.
Even though our back-end is already largely set up for usage-based pricing, it will require some research and implementation work. We'll be starting research in Q2; depending on the results, usage-based pricing can be expected to arrive in Q2 or Q3.
Conclusion
We have big plans for Paradym in 2024. In the end, all of them come down to making the platform fit your setup, your requirements, and your timeline. Besides these bigger features and milestones, we'll also be implementing UI changes for a better user experience and of course listening to your feedback. Happy building!
