Whoever already knows signs it
They sign something they knew about you anyway: that you graduated, that you are on the register, that you are old enough. They learn nothing new by doing it.
Decentralised identity
Your identity stays with you
Prove what you need to prove, and nothing else. An organisation you already deal with confirms something it knows about you. You keep it on your phone. When somebody asks, you send an answer they can check themselves — not a copy of your papers.
- Open source
- Decentralised
- Everything travels encrypted
- Everything leaves a record
- Your data is not in the network
There is not one piece of your data in the network. Not your name, not your address, not your date of birth.
Countdown to launch
Almena launches in
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11 November 2026 · UTC
01 How it works
Three parties, and nobody in the middle
A university stands behind its graduates. A professional body behind its members. A council behind what its register says. Each of them carries a public note saying how far it has been checked itself. You keep what they signed, and you show it when somebody asks.
You keep it
On your phone, your tablet or your computer, behind the security chip the device already has. Nobody keeps it for you, and nobody can open it.
Whoever needs it asks
They ask — “are you old enough?” — and your device answers with a proof made from what you keep. They check it themselves: that the signature is good, that it is yours, and that nobody has withdrawn it. They never see your papers.
02 What it is for
The same errand, with almost nothing handed over
Everything above is the mechanism. This is what it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday — first for the person doing the errand, and then for the organisation on the other side of the counter.
01 / 06
“Are you of age?”
A shop, a site or a door has to know you are old enough. Today that means handing over a document that says far more than that.
The question has to be one somebody wrote down in advance: over 18 works because it was declared, over 21 only if that was declared too. And the answer you give is stable, so two sites that both receive it can tell it came from the same person — this minimises what you show; it does not make you untraceable.
What leaves your device
Your name kept
Your date of birth kept
Your document number kept
Your address kept
Of age: yes shown
02 / 06
“Registered, and in this speciality?”
A client, a hospital, a court or a marketplace has to know you are on the register and in good standing before letting you work.
If you are struck off it stops verifying from that moment, with nobody to ring and nothing to hand back. What Almena never does is judge whether your professional body was right to do it.
What leaves your device
Your registration number kept
Your address kept
Your record kept
Registered: yes · Speciality shown
03 / 06
“This degree, from this university?”
An employer wants to know your degree is real. Today they either believe a PDF anybody could edit, or they ring the university and wait.
The university signs it once instead of answering verifications forever, which is the half of this that pays for itself. It stays the university's fact: Almena carries it and does not check it.
What leaves your device
Your marks kept
Your record kept
Your date of birth kept
Graduated: yes shown
04 / 06
“Registered as resident here?”
Residence, student status, a recognised degree of disability. Today you queue at one counter for a certificate in order to hand it in at another.
Almena changes what has to travel for you to prove something. It changes nothing about what an administration knows, how it came to know it, or whether it is right.
What leaves your device
Your file kept
Your exact address kept
Everything else the register holds kept
Resident: yes shown
05 / 06
“A real person, of age, resident here?”
Opening an account somewhere that has to check who you are. Today you photograph a passport and hand over everything on it to get past three questions.
Three answers instead of a document, which is less for them to hold and less for you to have handed over. What a regulator obliges them to keep is a separate question, and not one a protocol answers.
What leaves your device
The photograph of your document kept
Your document number kept
Your full address kept
A person: yes shown
Of age: yes shown
Resident: yes shown
06 / 06
You lose it, and it is still yours
The question everybody asks about holding your own keys, answered before you are in a position to have to ask it.
Guardians are a way back and never a way in. They can help you return; they can never act as you, and neither can we. Choosing them is something you do before you need them, not after.
What never happens
- Somebody else holding your identity for you
- A guardian able to use it
- Us able to reach it
What you do
- From any other device, throw the lost one out at once
- If everything is gone, the guardians you chose bring you back
- Your recovery words sit under both
01 / 06
Issue once instead of answering for ever
A university, a professional body or an employer spends real effort confirming the same facts one request at a time, by phone and by email.
What it asks of you is publishing the form you issue with, and keeping it up to date. You are vouching for a fact you already hold: Almena adds no knowledge about your people, asks for none, and never becomes a party to what you know.
Today
- Somebody answers each verification by hand
- The file you send can be edited by anyone
- You never find out where it ended up
With Almena
- You sign the fact once, when it becomes true
- Whoever needs it checks it themselves, whenever they need to
- You are not in the loop at all
02 / 06
It stops being good the moment it stops being true
Somebody leaves, is struck off, or a qualification is annulled. What you issued has to stop counting now — not at the next renewal.
The record is corrected forward and never erased. Revocation is a fact about the credential and not about the person, and it says nothing about why — whoever needs the why has to ask you, which is where that question belongs.
Today
- You reissue, or you wait for something to expire
- Whoever already has a copy still has it
- Nobody checking is told anything changed
With Almena
- You revoke, and it takes effect forward from that instant
- Every verifier checking after that gets a no
- What was valid when it was signed stays valid
03 / 06
Take somebody on without keeping their documents
You need three answers about a new customer, and today you receive a photograph of a passport in order to get them.
Data you never received is data you cannot leak. What a regulator obliges you to keep is a separate question, and not one a protocol gets to answer for you.
Today
- You receive the scan of a document
- You store it, encrypt it and delete it on a schedule
- If it leaks, it leaks from you
With Almena
- You ask: a real person, of age, resident here
- You receive three answers, each checkable by you alone
- There is nothing left for you to protect
04 / 06
Asking for less, and being seen to
What you ask of people is a decision you make today in private, and pay for in storage, in risk and in trust.
The catalogue forbids nothing and you still decide what to ask — it makes the choice legible. That does not make abuse impossible; nothing in a protocol can. It moves the remedy to where it works: reputation, and regulation.
Today
- What you ask for is visible to nobody
- Asking for more than you need costs nothing
- You end up holding what you never needed
With Almena
- Your form sits in a public catalogue
- Asking for more becomes a visible decision
- Less to store, less to protect, less to explain
05 / 06
One way to check, whoever signed it
Accepting credentials from twelve issuers today means twelve integrations, twelve agreements and twelve things that break separately.
Almena tells you who signed and whether it still stands. Which issuers are worth believing stays your decision, and the published grade an issuer carries is an input to it rather than an answer.
Today
- An integration for each issuer
- A key exchange for each issuer
- A phone call whenever something looks wrong
With Almena
- One check: the signature is good, it belongs to whoever shows it, it answers the form, nobody withdrew it
- A new issuer needs nothing from you
- The answer is the same shape every time
06 / 06
Act as an organisation, not as somebody's password
What an organisation does that matters should not hang on one person being available, honest, and not tricked.
Somebody leaving does not lock the rest out, and a pending signature that would destroy something cannot be rushed through by waiting for people to be away: there is a floor under how soon it can expire.
Today
- A shared password
- A key that lives in one laptop
- An act nobody can attribute
With Almena
- You set it: any three of five, or whatever you decide
- Each of them signs from their own device
- Every act carries who signed it
03 What is different
The asking is public. Your answers never are
Nothing you answer is ever published — not one piece of it, not once. What gets published is the question. Every request is made with a form written down beforehand, and every form sits in a list anybody can read and compare.
The errand: proving you are old enough
What is often asked for
4
- Full name
- Date of birth
- Document number
- Home address
What is enough
1
- Of age: yes
So a shop that asks for your whole date of birth just to check your age is not doing it in secret. What it asks for is there for anybody to look up, next to everybody else who asks for less. What you answered stays between the two of you.
- 01
The form is written down
A verifier says in advance exactly which fields it will ask for.
- 02
It goes in the catalogue
Published, next to the form of everybody else who asks for the same thing.
- 03
It is what gets asked
The request at the counter is that form — not a question made up on the spot.
- 04
So more is visible
Asking for more than the errand needs is something anybody can look up.
This does not make abuse impossible. Nothing in software can. It makes it visible, and the remedy is outside: reputation, and the law.
04 Your keys
It really is yours, and there is a way back
If your identity is yours, nobody can take it away. It also means nobody can hand it back. Almena is built so that the second half has an answer — and so that everything the device keeps is encrypted, with keys made inside its own chip that never leave it.
Several devices
Your account works on all of them at once, and from any one of them you can throw out the one you lost, right then. Nothing to type in, nothing to wait for.
Guardians
People you choose who can help you back in if you lose everything. They never hold your identity, and they can never take it.
Words as the floor
A handful of words you keep. It is the last resort, and the app tells you straight what it can and cannot do without them.
Not every computer has that chip. Where it is missing the protection is a step lower, and the app tells you so instead of letting you assume.
05 The network
Open, traceable, and answerable
Anybody can run a node: no permission, no sign-up, no money down. The program it runs is public, so what a node does can be read instead of taken on trust. Everything that happens is written down and signed, and anybody can go back over it. None of what is written down is data about you.
A hostile node can refuse, never lie
Everything you get is signed by whoever had the right to say it. Whoever passed it to you is only the messenger, and it does not matter who they are.
Every act leaves a trace
Issuing something, withdrawing it, trusting somebody: each one is written down and signed, and none of it is ever rewritten. A mistake is fixed by adding the correction after it, never by covering it up.
What travels is encrypted
Messages between an organisation, you and whoever is asking are encrypted the whole way. The node carrying one cannot read it, and neither can anybody watching the wire.
06 Where the work is
What is built, and what is coming
Almena is open source and is being built in the open, in the order its dependencies allow. This is what the platform will let somebody do, and how far each part has got.
- 10 Built
- 1 Under way
- 2 Later
- Built
The record everything is written in
One single way of writing down and signing each entry, that two different programs read exactly the same.
- Built
A node anybody can run
Starting a node, creating an identity on it, and having anybody look that identity up without asking permission.
- Built
A network that agrees without trusting itself
Several nodes giving the same answers, where what is already closed cannot be reopened, what the record says exists can be shown to still be there, and a new node can start from nothing without having to believe whoever is feeding it. A machine behind a home router takes part through a node that offers to carry it, and whoever puts up a node can claim it — with both of them saying so, on a record anybody can read.
- Built
The app that holds your identity
One account across your phone, your tablet and your computer, and any of them able to throw out one you have lost. If the phone is the only one you had, your twelve words stop the account from a machine you have just picked up — immediately, and without leaving anything of yours on it.
- Built
Delivery while your phone is shut
An encrypted inbox, so somebody can leave you something when you are not there and you pick it up later.
- Built
Organisations, and who signs for them
A university, a professional body or an administration operating as itself, with more than one person having to agree on what matters.
- Built
Vouching for an organisation
A published grade saying how far an organisation has been checked, and a withdrawal that takes effect the moment it is decided.
- Built
The public catalogue of what is asked for
Every request form published where anybody can read it, next to everybody else asking for the same thing.
- Built
Issuing, showing and withdrawing
The whole errand from end to end: something issued against a published form, answered with a proof, checked, and withdrawn when it stops being true.
- Built
Getting back in when you lose everything
Guardians you chose, a recovery that empties the devices you lost, and an identity that is yours again.
- Under way
Open beyond the pilot
The platform open to anyone, with a real credential from a real issuer accepted by a real verifier.
- Later
Voting on the network itself
Proposals and votes with a closed list of who may take part, so decisions about Almena are taken the way Almena works.
- Later
Working with wallets that already exist
Speaking the protocols other identity systems already use, so a credential does not need Almena at both ends.
07 Technology
Nobody owns it, and that is the point
There is no company holding this up, and no server everything passes through. That is not a slogan: it changes what can happen to you, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not mean.
Nobody can switch it off
There is no company holding it up. If a node goes down the others carry on, and if whoever started it walked away tomorrow the network would not notice.
Nobody sits in the middle watching
There is no server everything passes through. What you show goes from your device to whoever asked, and nobody else sees it go by.
You are not tied to whoever gave it to you
Your identity does not live in anybody's account. Stop liking the node you use and you change node, not identity — and nothing you hold stops working.
The rules cannot be changed quietly
There is no master key over them. A change is proposed in the open, and until it is agreed what counts is what is already written down.
Decentralised does not mean nobody decides anything. Almena decides who carries the trust grade, who may hold a public name, and who may define the forms everybody asks with — and it is Almena that calls the network's votes. That is a decision on the record, not an oversight, and it is the part of this that is not neutral.
What it is aiming at
- EUDI ARF
- The framework behind the European identity wallet.
- ISO 18013-5
- The driving licence on a phone, and one of the places the platform's own choices come from.
- OpenID4VP
- A way of asking for a credential that other systems already speak.
These three are not built. They are why the platform was designed the way it was: the gaps a bridge to them would need are held open, so that reaching them is an extension rather than starting again.
07 What it is not
Said plainly, because it is easy to assume otherwise
A platform is also the things it refuses to be, and those are worth as much as the promises.
It stores nobody's personal data
Whoever issued it keeps what they know. The network keeps who is who, who is trusted and what has been withdrawn — and not every node keeps the same part of that.
It is not a place where transactions happen
No payments, no exchange of value, no tokens.
It is not a vault, a loyalty scheme or a messenger
A credential stands behind one fact about a person. It is not a coupon, a receipt or a file.
It does not judge
It shows what each party asks for and leaves the decision to whoever takes the risk.
08 Open source
Nothing here depends on trusting us
Nobody can take your identity from you, and nothing anybody asks of you is hidden.
Almena is open source and belongs to nobody. There is no master key over the rules and no privileged reader of the network. Anybody can run a node, the program it runs is public, what travels between people is encrypted, and every answer can be checked by whoever gets it.
Read the code on GitHub