The Community Stack

We are proud to introduce “The Community Stack” by walt.id. The next iteration of our open-source product offering, enabling you to build identity and wallet solutions across industries and ecosystems.

It has always been our goal to provide developers and organizations with great tools, so they can focus on delivering holistic identity solutions. Taking the lessons learned from previous products, we decided to redesign our current offering, resulting in what we now call The Community Stack. A collection of open-source products providing everything to launch any identity solution with ease.

Let’s dive in.

The Developers’ Dilemma (why a new stack)

Over the last years, we have seen changes in standards and ecosystems. We’ve partnered with various public and private sector clients, launched many proof of concepts and thousands of developers used our tools. 

This revealed the need for more compact libs that are easier to scale and work with, native mobile apps and the option to build natively with more programming languages, especially JavaScript.

To address this, we redesigned our stack, offering organizations and developers a new way to build identity solutions. 

The new stack offers:

• Flexibility & Modularity – Purpose driven modules allow you to mix and match functionalities based on requirements, ensuring a small and performant codebase. Features become easier accessible and extensible through a more compact scope.

• Interoperable & Future Proof – The new stack works with any identity wallet or ecosystem, ensuring great interoperability. Importantly, it enables horizontal growth in terms of functionality, ecosystems and external services.

• Multi-Platform – Being multi-platform based means developers can build with what they already know. The code works in different environments, from the browser to mobile. 

• Dev UX & Utility – The new white-label apps make it easier than ever to launch a full-fledged solution. Our APIs give you anything needed to build Issuer, Verifier or Wallet capabilities into any app.

• Open-Source – The best part, all components of the new stack are open-source (Apache 2), so that anyone can use the code for free and without limitation.

The new stack

Multi platform libraries

The new multi-platform libraries are available in many programming languages, like Kotlin/Java, JavaScript and others. You can mix and match identity features, different credential formats and ecosystems as needed. Users only get what they need. No Overhead.

• Core Libs: Unified libraries offering core digital identity features. For example, the Crypto for keypair management and signatures, SD-JWTs to issue Selective Disclosure JSON-Web Tokens, DID lib for managing DIDs, OIDC4VC lib for protocol issuance and verification and the JSON-LD lib for creating JSON-LD data structures.

• Credential Libs: Libs for diverse credential standards. Examples are the mdoc-credentials lib to create and verify mdoc credentials and the verifiable-credentials lib for issuing and verifying W3C Credentials using the corresponding signatures (JWT, SD-JWT and JSON-LD).

• Ecosystem Libs: Abstractions for diverse ecosystem specific functionalities like trust registry operations. E.g. for EBSI, cheqd, eIDAS2, IOTA and more.

Services / APIs

REST interfaces for developers and organisations to enhance their apps with Issuer, Verifier and Holder capabilities in no time. 

• Issuer API: Enable apps to issue credentials (VCs, mdocs) and tokens (NFTs/SBTs) across ecosystems.

• Verifier API: Enable apps to verify any identity credential or token based on dynamic verification policies.

• Wallet API: Extend apps with holistic identity wallet capabilities like collecting, storing, managing and sharing of identity credentials or tokens.

White Label Apps

With our customisable white label apps, you can build and launch quickly. The only thing you need is your data and styling.

• Web Issuer: Web issuer portal or claim page supporting protocols like OIDC4VC.

• Web Verifier: Web verifier portal or verification page supporting protocols like OIDC4VP.

• Wallet: Wallet to collect, manage and share credentials (VCs, mdocs) and to display tokens (NFTs/SBTs) based on a progressive web app (PWA) that works across devices.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

Try out different features and manage services directly from the terminal, via the walt.id CLI. The next credential issuance is only one command away.

External Services

Being a big believer in interoperability, we've built our stack in a way that lets you combine our tools with others. Might it be an external key storage like the Hashicorp Vault, the use of EU Trust Service Providers/ Trust Registries for issuance and verification, or an external Identity Verification Service. We are continuously working on making the third party services compatible with ours. If we don’t support a service yet, developers and organisations can extend our products directly or reach out.

Get started

Build your end-to-end use cases or applications with our open source stack: The Community Stack.

Start building

Transition

To make the transition from the old to the new stack easier, we’ve prepared a transition guide for the SSI-Kit and Wallet-Kit.

• SSI-Kit Transition

• Wallet-Kit Transition

Frequently Asked Question

• Are your products open source? Which license do you use?

  Yes, our core products are open source under the Apache 2 license. The Enterprise Stack and Cloud Platform include features and capabilities which are not open source (e.g. multi-tenancy, data persistence, audit logs, integrations).

• Do you offer support contracts?

  Yes, offer support contracts for the Community Stack and the Enterprise Stack. Contact us to learn more.

• Do you help with pilots or proof-of-concepts?

  You can build pilots with our open source solutions or contact us if you want support from our team.

• What is the difference between the Community Stack and the Enterprise Stack?

  The Enterprise Stack is more stable, robust, scalable, reliable and offers additional capabilities.

  • Multi-Tenancy to manage multiple projects, users and accounts within them.

  • Data persistence for DIDs, keys, sessions (OID4VC), logs, pre-defined issuance and verification requests.

  • Resource protection through authentication for offered APIs. 

  • Scalability based on multi-tenancy and multiple instances.

  • Pre-configured Issuance and verification requests to automate processes and user flows.

  • Audit & event logging (e.g. credential issuance or verification, active wallets, …) across Issuer, Wallet and Verifiers.

  • Integrations with third party services (that are not included in OSS) like ID verification, identity and access management, qualified trust services, KMS, data storage etc.

  • Admin UI that facilitates the use of the Enterprise Stack and offers analytics

  The Community Stack can support production-grade solutions, yet the Enterprise Stack offers advantages like richer features and integrations, faster time to market, less overhead (dev, maintenance), more reliability and stability, higher scalability, compliance with standards and regulations.

  You can learn more here.

• What is the difference between the Enterprise Stack and the Cloud Platform?

  Our identity and wallet infrastructure is available for different deployment options:
  1. Enterprise (Self-Managed): Customers can deploy, manage and run our solutions on-prem or in their cloud environments.
  2. Cloud Platform (SaaS): Customers can rely on our managed services and APIs - deployed and run by walt.id.

• I have other questions. How can I get in touch?

  If you have any other questions, you can contact us here.

Open questions ?

Contact us or join us on Discord, we are happy to help.