Identosphere 236 July 21-27: Ecosystems Support Community Group • Human-Centric Roadmap for Europe • Self-Hosting • Safetypedia • did:webvh •
In the Mainstream:
(Fast Company) The evolution of digital identity: Beyond device fingerprinting
The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 framework mandates interoperable digital wallets for cross-border use by 2026, and in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security is backing mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) as a secure, decentralized form of verification.
Europe
(MyData) A Human-Centric Roadmap for Europe
MyData Global has submitted A Human-Centric Roadmap for Europe to the European Commission’s public consultation on Data Union Strategy. The Roadmap describes how a human-centric approach to data policy and services can promote European innovation and competition, while enhancing digital sovereignty and upholding European values. It provides a set of recommendations and concrete actions for pursuing this through the European Data Union Strategy.
Research: Agentic Web
The Trust Fabric: Decentralized Interoperability and Economic Coordination for the Agentic Web
Exploring DID Methods
[Podcast] Verifying a Web of Truth (did:webvh, Part 1)
[Podcast] Verifying a Web of Truth (did:webvh, Part 2)
did:webvh adds historical verifiability to did:web, using cryptographic provenance to establish that the current DID document is the result of legitimate updates by the DID controller. Today on the show we talk with Stephen Curran and John Jordan, co-creators and implementers of the did:webvh specification.
Organizational Developments
OIDF launches Ecosystems Support Community Group
The OpenID Foundation’s new Ecosystems Support Community Group is open to all who wish to join the conversation and contribute to the discussion.
What we will do:
* Capture existing and emerging ecosystem configurations and develop an Ecosystems Tracker.
* Evaluate key differences between ecosystem configurations and specifications.
* Assess how to combine different specifications.
* Capture and communicate ecosystems’ requirements to other WGs, OIDF’s conformance test team and OIDF, in general.
The new ESCG will also develop, or initiate the development of, best practices and reference architectures to support different types of ecosystems, assisting key decision-making for governance bodies. These guides will provide recommendations for specifications, associated design of conformance testing, and other aspects of ecosystem development and deployment.
OpenID Foundation demonstrates real-world interoperability of new Digital Identity Issuance Standards
Today the OIDF is proud to announce that the OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance (OpenID4VCI) specification has proven interoperability through the pairwise testing of seven issuers and five wallets providers from around the world.
DIF Newsletter #52
* DIF partnered with MIT's Project NANDA for a well-attended event at Circuit Launch on July 18, 2025,
* The DID Methods Working Group focused intensively on W3C standardization efforts and refining the evaluation process for DIF-recommended DID methods.
* Identifiers and Discovery: The DID:webvh team made substantial progress toward their 1.0 specification release, with multiple implementations now passing comprehensive test suites and performance analysis demonstrating efficient handling of DID updates.
(Internet Safety Labs) [video] PEPR '25 - Safetypedia: Crowdsourcing Privacy Inspections
Internet Safety Labs has a goal to have current safety labels for all [more than 5M] mobile apps by 2029. To accomplish this, we've been experimenting with two paths: automation and crowdsourcing.
Lets Envision the Future
The future is NOT Self-Hosted, but Self-Sovereign
The future won’t be self-hosted. But it can be self-sovereign—if we build the right protocols.
There is no shared protocol for identity, no agreed standard for portable, user-owned data, no common infrastructure for composable interaction.
It means having ownership without captivity, portability without friction, and interoperability without central dependence.
That’s where DID (Decentralized Identifiers) come in—not as a product, but as a protocol. A universal way of representing identity, without anchoring it to a specific service, vendor, or platform. With a DID, I can have an identity that is cryptographically mine, interoperable by design, and usable across systems that respect the protocol. It’s not a login method. It’s a foundation.
Why should self-hosting stay locked behind geek walls? It’s just waiting for its iPhone moment.
Self-hosting today is still a mess — even for seasoned developers.
But that’s exactly what things looked like before major paradigm shifts. Smartphones were also clunky, fragmented, and inaccessible — until the iPhone integrated hardware, software, identity, and distribution into one seamless experience.
Decentralised Identity (DID) and the Future of Secure Logins
That’s decentralised identity in its promise, the possibility of controlling your online identity in a community-driven fashion, without third parties pretending to be big tech companies. Instead of your data sitting in massive databases just dying to be breached, you control what you disclose and to whom.
Company News
Indicio and Black Mountain Investment Group Partner to Modernize KYC and Digital Identity Verification for Exchanges, Banks, and Law Firms
Traditional meets decentralized finance in our next-generation, 3-factor authentication, digital identity solution. Powered by Verifiable Credentials, authenticated biometrics, and real-time database validation, this innovation provides the assurance needed for safe international asset transactions and establishes seamless and secure cross-border asset flows.
Billions Becomes Sentient’s Official Identity and Reputation Partner
Together, Sentient and Billions fix this. Together, we’re building the foundation for trust on the new internet — a system that makes private global verification possible. This infrastructure makes it possible to:
* Verifies human users (without storing biometric data)
* Creates an onchain reputation system to track safety, reputation history, and performance
* Provides sybil-resistant reward mechanisms that ensure fairness across the network
Cardano Foundation Quarterly: Q2 2025
This quarter began with a significant step forward in digital identity solutions. In April, the Foundation launched Veridian, a next-generation platform for privacy-preserving, interoperable credential verification. This open-source solution, complete with iOS and Android wallet applications, empowers self-sovereign identity through decentralized identifiers (KERI) and verifiable credentials (ACDC). Its design prioritizes enterprise readiness, offering transparency, interoperability, and scalability across sectors like healthcare, finance, academia, and supply chain. Sandbox environments, hosted in Switzerland, facilitate pilot testing that showcases Veridian’s practical applications.
Data Unions
Saving Journalism with Sectoral Data Bargaining
Many of the challenges facing information producers can be understood from the fact that they are siloed into many separate platforms, while the AI products that compete with them can integrate all of their information into a single place. Without similar efforts at upstream integration, they risk being “divided and conquered,” which could result in extreme economic challenges.
One effort at such integration is being led by OpenMined Foundation and RadicalxChange Foundation (2024-2025 MyData Award winner), which have developed a new prototype empowering creators to manage AI training on their content collectively, instead of individually offering their data on a fragmented basis.
Web Components
(Phil Windley) Components for Web Apps
The web has come a long way since static HTML. Even so, building user interfaces is still often an exercise in complexity: frameworks layered on frameworks, intricate build tools, and brittle glue code tying everything together. But there's another way—native, composable building blocks, pieces of UI that can be easily reused, reasoned about, and combined without pulling in half the npm registry. That's the promise of web components, and it's why tools like XMLUI are exciting. They let us focus on function and structure, not scaffolding and ceremony.