Jolocom’s role is to empower everyone and everything capable of having a self-sovereign identity to freely communicate and share information with each other. Based on this principle, our company was founded back in 2014. While a lot has changed since then, our mission still remains the same. Read the full story of why Joachim Lohkamp decided to found Jolocom as a decentralized identity company here.  

On our 8th birthday, we are grateful to look back on milestones, developments, and challenges that we have overcome. Beyond the tech, we believe in the importance of community and building a space for individuals and companies that are committed to the values of decentralization. We are happy to share our story.  

We especially and sincerely thank all of our partners, communities, advisors and individuals who have been contributing to what Jolocom is today.

2015-2016

These years saw the development of our first lightweight wallet, Little Sister (the opposite to Big Brother), the decentralized identity Wallet, library, and protocol. It was during this time (January 2016) that we joined the Agile Horizon 2020 project to provide a trusted data sharing provider using SOLID and Ethereum for IoT devices. Want to learn more about our early work with Horizon 2020 and our tech of the day? Check here.

2017

As cannot be stressed often enough, we strongly believe in the spirit of community and are thus proud to work with a bunch of partners that inspire and motivate us further. Some of those include:  

• Deutsche Telekom, T-Labs and Riddle&Code to build a fully decentralized emobility ecosystem  
• Bundesblock, of which Joachim was an intitator and founding member, and with whom we authored the first of its kind Self-Sovereign Identity Position Paper #SSIPaper, with many leaders from the SSI space 
• Stad Antwerpen, the Flemish government innovation procurement department, and Digipolis to bring decentralized identity services to municipal employees and citizens in Flanders  
• INATBA, the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications, of which Kai is a Board Member  

For more information on who we are working with, visit our partners page.

2018

Jolocom released its technical whitepaper, a comprehensive introduction to the Jolocom Protocol for digital identity. Those principles also found their way into our next edition of the SmartWallet (replacing the alpha version from March 2017), which was released in March 2018, running on our decentralized identity protocol.

Furthermore, we joined the “Blockchain on the Move” Project, partnering with the Flemish government, the goal being to return control over their identity data back to citizens.  

2019  

One of our principles is that of interoperability. To apply it in practice, we took part in an interoperability focused proof of concept. The scope of the project was to achieve interoperability across a multistep use case, called OSIP 2.0. In the same year, we had the pleasure of traveling to the headquarters of Deutsche Telekom in Bonn for the official launch of Xride. This fully decentralized e-mobility pilot was initiated by T-Labs and built in collaboration with Riddle & Code, Bundesdruckerei, Simple Mobility, and Jolocom. Find out more about our role in this project here. 

Started in 2014, the DWeb community took off in February 2019 and soon formed a thriving network of Nodes with Jolocom as the leader of DWebBLN Node (formerly Digital Identity Meetups Berlin). 

2020  

Starting the new decade right, Jolocom participated as SSI technology provider in 4 of 11 competing regional showcase projects developing ecosystem solutions. The Schaufenster Sichere Digitale Identitäten (SDI) innovation competition was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economics Affairs and Energy. Eventually, our projects ONCE, SDIKA, and ID-IDEAL were selected for a three year implementation phase. The SDI projects are special because they bring a broad and diverse group of stakeholders to the table who are working together to kick-start an ecosystem for decentralized identities. Interoperability is at their core, so that the use of digital identification does not remain inefficient.  

Furthermore, the Jolocom SmartWallet passed a GDPR compliance audit, a major milestone to becoming fully production-ready. 

2021  

In spring we began the implementation phase for the project ONCE, followed by ID-Ideal in the summer of 2021. In the initial phase, the projects focused extensively on the development, implementation and integration of the technical components. Soon, however, the implementation of first use cases from the areas of public administration, mobility and tourism will come to the fore. 

Over the years, Jolocom pulled off a great number of project implementations. The focus here is of course on SSI. But Jolocom has also been able to acquire a lot of knowledge through active work in the field of technology or in networks of various bodies (e.g. W3C, DIF, INATBA) and consortia (e.g. Essif-Labs, SDI lighthouse projects). All that, in turn, helped to build out our core solution stack. 

A great example is the ConDIDi project, where Jolocom built a use case for decentralized conference participant management together with the TIB Leibniz in Hannover, which can be tried out here. 

Tech developments and projects with Jolocom are constantly evolving. 

To Jolocom the community matters, and we believe that core protocols need to be shared to enable an open infrastructure. This is why Jolocom implemented two essential building blocks for SSI (DIDCommv2 and KERI) in Rust, and donated them to DIF (Decentralized Identity Foundation).  

Also, Jolocom implemented the did:stack:v2 for Stacks Foundation. Jolocom’s SSI integration for Stacks addresses the issue of properly verifiable and secure information from different parties. 

2022 

The year has started by launching the Jolocom Agent to further compliment the full Jolocom end-to-end solution. The Agent is for creating, issuing and managing verifiable credentials and define, perform and manage verifications. The Agent provides a Graphical User Interface for ease of use and rapidly bulding out your use case. An APIs is avalilable for a seemless integration in your backend. 

Of course much more has happened. A good way of keeping track of our progress, partnerships, community and more is getting the monthly Jolocom’s SSI Digest in your inbox. 

What’s next: beside the launch of multiple use cases in the second half of 2022, we are also working hard to ship the Jolocom SDK 2.0 to you. Stay tuned!