Credential Badges

Project Goal

Credential Badges is an easy-to-use web application that helps website owners embed cryptographically verifiable credentials directly into their websites or digital platforms. Unlike traditional badges or review systems—which can easily become outdated, forged, or manipulated—Credential Badges leverages decentralized identifiers (DIDs), W3C Verifiable Credentials, and blockchain technology to ensure badges remain authentic, traceable, and continuously verifiable in real time.

With Credential Badges, trusted entities such as universities, companies, certification bodies, or industry experts can publicly issue badges or endorsements, granting clear recognition of courses completed, sponsorships received, or verified trust statements. Website owners can then easily embed these badges on their pages using simple, customizable JavaScript snippets provided by the application. Visitors to these websites can instantly verify any badge’s authenticity and current validity with a quick click, with no complicated setup or identity wallets required.

The application is currently provided as a proof of concept, demonstrating how cryptographic verification can enhance the transparency and reliability of credentials shared online. While the project itself is essentially complete, its open-source nature invites exploration, experimentation, and further development by interested users and developers.

Here is a brief overview of the main application in a video: https://youtu.be/QgOi2EtLlGg

If you want to go through the steps of issuing a sample badge yourself, here is a simple step-by-step guide.

The project is fully open-source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Example Badges

A set of Sample can be viewed here

Project History & Development

The project was funded through Cardano's Project Catalyst with the intent of increasing the reach of the Atala PRISM brand. Atala was a subdivision of IOG. In 2024, Atala was cut back, leaving only a core team. The technical platform was rebranded as Identus and is now part of Hyperledger.

Credential Badges was initially envisioned in 2022, revised, and submitted for voting in late 2023. While the core idea has stayed the same, some assumptions and, consequently, implementation concepts have changed over time. One core assumption was that the SSI ecosystem within the Cardano ecosystem would take off, given investments from IOG and product decisions from the Atala team. In particular, it was assumed that an SSI wallet would already be available, simplifying credential handling. While IOG had long planned to integrate SSI into Lace (the IOG browser wallet for the Cardano ecosystem), this still isn't the case as of March 2025.

Consequently, we had to work with what was available within the Identus ecosystem. Several key decisions had to be made regarding how a credential would be created and what kind of credential this would be. We decided to split the project into two separate applications, which can be used together but also function independently.

The main value proposition of the proposal was to transform an existing credential into something embeddable in a website while remaining verifiable. The first application achieves just that: a user can paste a credential into the application, and the app generates an embeddable HTML snippet. From a technical perspective, we decided to focus on Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.1, using did:prism as the issuer, since this is also generated by an [Identus cloud agent ](https://github.com/hyperledger-identus/cloud-agent. Additionally, we extended the capability to support certain types of OpenBadge Credentials (3.0), as they are an extension of the W3C VC standard (Data Model 2.0). This served two purposes: primarily, it allowed us to use the data structure of OpenBadges, eliminating the need to invent our own schema for structuring the internal data (i.e., the Credential Subject) of the credential. Instead, we could rely on an established standard (see OpenBadges 3.0 spec).

This decision has the side effect that the platform, in theory, can also embed OpenBadges 3.0 credentials not created with the Identus cloud agent or even with another DID method. To prove this point, we also partially support did:key and did:web. However, this may not work consistently with random OpenBadge-compatible credentials due to the wide range of schema variations, allowed DID methods, and cryptographic signatures that cannot be fully covered by this project. Implementing all variations would be far beyond this proof-of-concept.

To ensure a reliable working concept, we created a second application dedicated to creating did:prism-based W3C Verifiable Credentials that are fully verifiable and, therefore, embeddable. While we could have used our custom implementation for issuing and signing credentials, we opted to build a solution specifically on top of the Identus cloud agent. This has the advantage that organizations already using the cloud agent can easily integrate our application into their infrastructure, providing a UI for issuing credentials to external parties. However, from a user perspective, the experience is less than optimal. The reason is that the Identus cloud agent is not an SDK, and issuing a credential—even for demo purposes—is a complex interaction between the "issuer" and the "holder" using a protocol called WACI, executed over a DIDComm connection. Both parties must be set up in the application as two agents that go through the issuance process. This is the main reason why we are not providing a single application; we consider the issuing application only as a workaround until more mature tooling or real production use cases for credential issuance emerge.

Project Structure

The project consists of two applications (see the explanation above):

• The Badges project (for embedding Verifiable Credentials)

  • Can be used as a hosted instance (for demo and production use): badges.blocktrust.dev

  • Can be self-hosted; see How to run or How to build

• The Credentials project (for issuing compliant Verifiable Credentials)

  • Available for demo purposes: credentials.blocktrust.dev

  • Can also be self-hosted (see links above), but we recommend either a modified version for your own branding and use-case adaptation or an entirely custom issuing process.