Indicio Revolutionizes Adoption of Open Badges

Indicio Proven™ now provides a privacy-preserving way to record, share, and verify educational achievements.

SEATTLE, Dec 5, 2023, Indicio, the world’s leading world’s leading provider of digital trust solutions, today announced the addition of the Open Badges 3.0 digital credential format to Indicio Proven™, Indicio’s flagship product for creating and communicating verifiable data.

Open Badges is a powerful digital format for recording educational achievements, skills, and other accomplishments. Increasingly popular as a standard, Open Badges are shared on social media and stored and managed on third-party platforms.

The addition of Open Badges into Indicio Proven, the leading software for enterprise adoption of verifiable credentials, makes it possible for the badge to be directly held and controlled by the person who earned the achievement in a wallet on their mobile device instead of being forced to access their records through a third-party provider or platform.

Indicio Proven makes holding, sharing, and verifying an Open Badges credential truly portable. Now, anyone using the same open-source issuing software can create an Open Badges credential, anyone with the app can receive and share an Open Badges credential, and anyone with the verification software can verify the source and the integrity of the data in the Open Badges credential.

By removing the need for a centralized Open Badges Platform, users have control over their privacy, they can consent to share Open Badge data in secure, privacy-preserving ways, and they — and not the platform — fully own their Open Badges credentials. Indicio will be the first to use the new Open Badge verifiable credentials, issuing them to those who complete training and workshops in the Indicio Academy training and workshops.

“Combining the Open Badges format with a verifiable credential releases its full power,” said Heather Dahl, CEO and co-founder of Indicio. “Similar to the Digital Travel Credential we developed on ICAO standards, we’re creating simple ways for our customers to build seamless processes with verifiable data. The Open Badges format is a great way to share and verify detailed academic records and information about skill sets. But now we’ve freed Open Badges to be even greater — to take advantage of interoperable, open-source technology, to be used in faster, more private, and more secure ways, and, of course, to be a record of achievement that can be owned and verified forever.”

Technical details

Indicio’s unique approach combines open-source verifiable credentials based on the W3C Verifiable Credential Data and 1EdTech Open Badges 3.0 (OBv3) standards with open source technologies from Hyperledger Foundation. This enables people to hold the records of their educational achievements in a digital wallet under their own control in perpetuity. These JSON-LD based credentials can be used to easily share verifiable information on social media, when applying to a job online, or with any verifier using open source verifiable credential technology to read the badge.

Open Badges can be issued using Indicio Proven for a wide range of participatory, educational, and learning scenarios and can be verified by ACA-Py and AFJ based agents. Badge types include: