Badge Update
By now, many of you have seen information on Discord, LinkedIn, or X about our very sudden digital badge platform move. We found ourselves having to move by December 31, 2025 and with the great financial support of our community, we did it! Over the course of a week, we raised enough money to make the move, reissued 11,413 digital badges on our new CanCred platform, and revoked the same number on our old platform. If that sounds a little insane, it sort of is, but here’s why we did it:
- The original platform wanted more than $5500 CAD just to get started, plus annual fees. The new platform is about $1500 annually CAD, with no start-up fees. In fact, all the work we’ve done so far has been under a free trial!
- We could not remain GDPR compliant if we left anything on the old platform. If anyone ever asked for their badge to be removed, there was no way for us to do it.
- CanCred gives the end user much more control over their badges. Don’t want it? Don’t accept it! Don’t want your name shown? Don’t allow it. Don’t want it public? Make it private. Change your mind later and don’t want it? Login and delete it.
- We also knew there were errors in some of the already issued badges. This gave us the opportunity to fix them as we moved them AND go back and fix anything we missed later.
- Moving everything also put all the badges in one place and added automations to some.
There are detailed instructions and troubleshooting information on Discord, so if you’re trying to figure out what happened to your badge, please start there!
Enough about badges though! Let’s take a look at what we did in 2025 and what 2026 has in store for Trace Labs!
What we did
2025 was a bit of a wild ride for us. The leadership team was rebuilt from the ground up over the summer. We have a lot more people volunteering now on the back end, which should hopefully make the workload lighter for everyone. In spite of all the change, we accomplished some great things:
- Onboarded 4 new team leaders and about 30 new volunteers
- Wrote a new Discord bot
- Reenergized our social media accounts (and got rid of some underperforming ones), including new videos and graphics
- Rolled out a new (free) educational series on TryHackMe
- Rolled out Weekly OSINT challenges in Discord
- Reconnected with existing sponsors and found new ones
- Updated badge graphics for a lot of categories
- Held a full-scale CTF in April, and supported LeHack France in June
- Held a small but successful CTF in November, implementing new tools for the Reporting Team
- Rolled out Master and Legacy Coach awards, along with Senior, Master, and Legacy Participant
- Released an updated Trace Labs VM in December
- Held our first ever focused fundraiser and rolled out a new badge platform as a result
- Plus all the smaller things that made the bigger things possible!
Where We’re Going
We have a lot of plans for 2026 and we have the volunteer staff to do them! Here are some of the highlights.
- Hold 4 full-scale CTFs (February, May, August, October) and a few smaller ones
- Re-open our online merchandise store
- Rollout a new Coach onboarding process
- Update our free participant and coach orientation trainings
- Roll out new low-cost paid trainings, some focused on CTF skills and some on general OSINT
- Move to a new lower cost ticketing platform
- Roll out a new CTF platform
- Create a Speaker’s Bureau and support local events with speakers and/or volunteers
- Restart On-going Operations
- Host a Community space at DEFCON Las Vegas (if they accept our application)
- Overhaul the website (including a new platform)
- And probably a thousand smaller items
Thanks for sticking around with us for another year! We hope to see you in Discord or maybe even in-person this year!
