2023 was a remarkable year at Dock as we gained more customers in various industries, made huge developments in our technology, and expanded our team. In the fast-paced world of digital identity and verifiable credentials, Dock has been a driving force of innovation and growth. Each new partnership has been a testament to our platform's versatility, our ability to tailor solutions to unique industry needs, and to incorporate feedback from our customers.
We've expanded our team with top-performers who are dedicated to serving our clients better and increasing adoption of our solutions. Dock is well positioned to accommodate the growing demand for verifiable credential and reusable identity technology that has largely been driven by increased regulations and government-led digital identity initiatives.
We’ll go over the highlights of the year, our achievements, and what we’re focusing on in 2024.
Growth and Adoption
We are seeing significant adoption by providers of identity solutions that want to embed our verifiable credential technology inside their offerings. In addition to identity providers that serve the cryptocurrency and Web3 space, we are thrilled by the enthusiasm of traditional identity businesses that recognize the transformative impact that our platform delivers.
During 2023, the number of trials in our platform increased around 84%!
Our upcoming feature launches in 2024 will further enable Dock to excel at helping our customers adapt in these evolving markets.
Expanded Dock Team
In order to better serve our existing customers with robust solutions, prompt support, and increase adoption, we’ve expanded our team and welcomed:
- Richard Esplin, Head of Product
- Agne Caunt, Customer Success Manager
- Euan Miller, Sales Manager
- Yusuf Tigil, Community Manager
- Johnson Tinuoye, Software Engineer
- Robert Vintilă, Software Developer
We are also excited to welcome a talented Sales Development Representative to our team in January who will increase our outreach to new sectors.
New Collaborations
Our customers work in various industries around the world including health and safety, education, and IT. They are located in South Africa, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, and the US.
Here are some of the collaboration announcements that you might have missed:
1) Polygon and Dock collaborate to simplify verifiable credential issuance
2) Appruvr integrates Dock to empower organizations to verify credentials instantly
3) Certs API is available on Rapid’s marketplace
On March 30, the Certs API became available on Rapid, the world’s largest API Hub where over 4 million developers find, test, and connect to tens of thousands of APIs with a single account.
Roadmap Updates
Over the four years that we’ve tracked our work, we’ve brought features from the public blockchain layer into our commercial products so that they can be easily adopted by our customers. We’ve also built additional application-level features to help our customers deploy complete solutions for their business problems.
Dock Platform Releases and Completed Milestones
You’ve probably noticed a number of tweaks to Dock Certs and the Dock Wallet to make them easier to use, including new notification areas, the use of more consistent terminology (such as “Schemas” instead of “Credential Templates”), and the addition of a product tour to introduce new users to the platform’s features. We’ve also made it easy to toggle Dock Certs and Dock Wallet between the Dock Testnet and Mainnet to make it easier to develop proofs of concept and demos.
Here are all of the groundbreaking features our engineering team shipped in 2023:
Dock Wallet and Wallet SDK
- Instant verification enables organizations to verify users’ digital credentials in seconds.
- Sorting and filtering credentials on the Dock Wallet makes it easier for users to find and manage their digital credentials.
- Dock’s white label digital identity wallet solution can be used by organizations to simply customize Dock’s pre-built digital identity wallet for their users rather than investing a lot of time, money, and resources developing their own wallet from scratch.
Dock Certs Web App
- Credential verification features allow users to confirm the authenticity of someone’s credentials.
- Sending credentials directly to recipients’ Dock Wallet and email helps issuers quickly deliver credentials to users, which saves time, improves efficiency, and ensures the secure delivery of credentials.
- No-code custom credential template builder enables users to create custom credential schemas to accommodate their specific needs and a variety of use cases.
- Credential issuers can now request missing data directly from users if they’re missing information to issue a credential such as their last name, email, or date of birth. See the demo.
- Invite multiple team members to help build the solutions for their organizations. You can try this functionality on the Starter Plan through the end of the year. Afterwards, it will only be available in the higher plan tiers.
Certs API
- Sub-accounts allow solution providers to provide access to Dock’s API for their customers while preserving security, data segregation, and easy user management.
- On the API level, we’ve enabled privacy-preserving credentials that leverage BBS+ signatures to support selective disclosure and zero-knowledge range proofs. These credentials will also soon be available in Dock Certs and the Dock Wallet.
- StatusList2021 will soon become the default method for revoking our standard credentials in a standards-compliant manner. We are in the process of enabling it for our other credential types. Not only is StatusList revocation more interoperable, it is also cheaper for bulk updates. However, our previous approach will remain available through the API because it is cheaper for users who are doing individual revocations.
Dock Blockchain
- Threshold signatures for secure multi-party credential transactions: The Dock blockchain now supports threshold signatures, which are a type of digital signature that requires the agreement of multiple parties on the credential being signed in order for it to be issued to a recipient.
Solutions
- Reusable identity solution: Solution implementers can use our guidance to learn why verified identity data should be turned into reusable digital identities from our articles, a masterclass describing how to structure a reusable identity solution, and a helpful demo. We have also prepared a demo for combining biometric data with verifiable credentials to bind identity data to individuals for smooth and fraud-resistant identity transactions.
2024 Priorities
Our feature set is now complete enough to meet the requirements of most identity projects. So as we enter a new year, we will be increasing our focus on the deployment needs of our largest customers who are in regulated environments. This will require lots of behind-the-scenes infrastructure and process improvements to prove our scalability and reliability. We will also continue refining our interfaces, SDKs, and APIs based on what we learn in these deployments.
This change in emphasis will impact some of these items we previously listed on our public roadmap:
- We’ll be postponing delegatable credentials, traceable credentials, and circom proofs until they are needed by one of our deployments.
- We have also decided to pause our work on an Ethereum bridge, as recent hacks of bridges between blockchains cause us to reevaluate the risk to our token security. We will revisit all of these features as we see demand for them in the future.
This adjustment in our priorities will allow our team to tackle some new features that we are excited to talk about in January. Be sure to check back for updates! Our plans for 2024 should make it Dock’s best year ever!
Events
We’ve met so many amazing thought leaders and builders in the industry at these events:
- Dock Presented at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in California (April 18-20)
- Dock Sponsored the Decentralized Identity Hackathon did:hack (June 5-8)
- Dock Demos Polygon ID Credential Issuance at the EthCC in Paris (July 17-20)
- Nick Lambert and Euan Miller Attended the Future Identity Festival to get insights on a variety of topics including verifiable credential technology, regulation, and the impact of AI (November 11-12)
- Francisco Baptista attended the Web Summit in Portugal, one of the world’s largest technology events where over 70,000 attendees gathered to redefine the global tech industry.
We plan to attend more events in 2024.
Media Publications and Podcasts
- Dock’s Article in the Supply & Demand Chain Executive Publication
- Dock’s guest post on Decentralized Identity Foundation’s blog
Dock’s Identi3 podcast
Our podcast is an excellent way to stay up to date on developments and trends in the fascinating world of digital identity, data security, and privacy.
Here are some of the incredible guests who we’ve spoken with this year:
- Sebastian Rodriguez and Otto Mora from Polygon ID discussing the Dock collaboration with Polygon ID
- Philipp Pointner from Jumio discussing reusable user-owned identity
- Sarah Clark from Mastercard discussing Mastercard’s Reusable Digital Identity Network
- Marie Wallace from Accenture discussing decentralized data exchanges
- Kim Hamilton Duffy from Centre discussing decentralized identity in finance
- Ewan Jooste from Gravity discussing health & safety certificate fraud
Connect With Us
As we look forward to the coming year, our consistent dedication to innovation remains as strong as ever. Building on the great momentum we’ve created in 2023, we plan to continue pushing the boundaries of technological advancement.
Our focus will be on not just enhancing the features of our platform, but also on pioneering new functionalities that anticipate and meet the evolving needs of our clients and the market. The goal is to make our platform not just a tool but an integral component in the digital identity and credential ecosystem.
Feel free to reach out at info@dock.io with any questions or feedback. Together, let's shape a more connected and secure digital future.
