About us

AS4 specialists

Chasquis specialises in AS4 messaging. Our lead engineer and Chasquis’ technical co-founder, Sander Fieten, is chairman of the OASIS ebMS standardisation committee and editor of the AS4 specification. He is also chairman of the OASIS BDXR standardisation committee that wrote the SMP specification.  We are the creators of Holodeck B2B, the open source AS4 messaging solution and Holodeck SMP, the open source SMP server. We also created and maintain Duuba, an open source library for XAdES signing.

We’re a small, fully remote team. Our headquarters is based in the Netherlands, but we serve customers all over the world.

About our name

Chasqui /cha:s-kee/ -n (-s) messenger.

In the ancient Inca empire in Peru, a chasqui was a messenger who delivered coded messages throughout the land. Information was recorded in a quipu, an encoding system using knotted strings to represent different things based on the kind, color and number of strings and knots. Just as with AS4 messages sent using our gateway, one chasqui’s ‘payload’ could also consist of a variety of ‘attachments’ besides the securely coded content. A chasqui could also transmit a verbal message or small items, or a combination of these.
The messenger would run along purpose built roads until he reached a relay station where he could hand his message to a rested chasqui to continue the delivery. You could say that this system of  was one of the first secure multi-hop messaging solutions!

Image at top of page: drawing of a chasqui from a book by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala dated around 1615.