Identosphere 248 Sept 6-12: Agentic AI • Bhutan adopts Ethereum • Billions on a roll • Verifiable AI with Self-Sovereign Identity: a Socio-Technical Exploration
This is the weekly Identosphere Newsletter sharing highlights from around the web covering Decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identity curated by Kaliya Young, Identity Woman.
Upcoming
Registration Open for OpenID Foundation Hybrid Workshop at Cisco on Mon 20th October 2025
Internet Identity Workshop #41 October 21-23 Mountain View California
How Do We Build Trust in Agentic Commerce? Demo Day October 22
W3C CCG APAC Friendly Time 22nd of October: A microcredential ecosystem
Agentic Internet Workshop* October 24th Mountain View California (*Inspired IIW by and hosted by the IIW Foundation
Deloitte Dept:
[Wall St Journal sponsored by Deloitte] Rethinking Identity Security: The Rise of Wallet-Based Credentials
A self-sovereign approach to identity security can transform business risk and customer trust, helping organizations shed related liabilities and strengthen cyber protections
When Deloitte Validates Your Vision: Billions’ Tech Stack Named in $4 Trillion Market Report
Billions’ tech stack and Privado ID is now part of the institutional playbook for tokenized finance.
And according to Deloitte’s latest report on semi-liquid funds - a $4 trillion market opportunity- they’re choosing our tech stack: Privado ID.
Worldcoin’s less ‘dystopian,’ more cypherpunk rival: Billions Network
We make it easy for you to prove who you are things like the fact youre a person, a unique human, not a bot, over a certain age, things like your KYC status, from the comfort of your own device, McCullen says. The system uses the updated Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) open standard from the World Wide Web Consortium “the good people who brought us the internet.
AI and Identity
(Video Instagram) Michael Casey has introduced a new organization dedicated to advancing decentralized AI
The initiative aims to build AI systems that are open, secure, and human-aligned—bridging Web3 innovation with enterprise adoption to enable privacy-preserving data ownership and collaboration across industries. The mission: to help shape the foundation of a more decentralized, AI-driven global economy.
New whitepaper tackles AI agent identity challenges
The rapid rise of AI agents presents urgent challenges in authentication, authorization, and identity management. Current agent-centric protocols (like MCP) highlight the demand for clarified best practices in authentication and authorization. Looking ahead, ambitions for highly autonomous agents raise complex long-term questions regarding scalable access control, agent-centric identities, AI workload differentiation, and delegated authority. This whitepaper is for stakeholders at the intersection of AI agents and access management. It outlines the resources already available for securing today’s agents and presents a strategic agenda to address the foundational authentication, authorization, and identity problems pivotal for tomorrow’s widespread autonomous systems.
Auth0 Token Vault: Secure Token Exchange for AI Agents
Building Trust in Agentic Commerce
If agentic AI is going to matter in e-commerce, we need guardrails that make it safe, compliant, and worth the operational risk. That is where authentication, authorization, and verification come in. Think identity, boundaries, and proof. Until teams can check those boxes with confidence, adoption will stall.
🔐 Why Policy Design Matter for Autonomous Agents
That’s why recent papers like : “Policy Design in Zero-Trust Distributed Networks: Challenges and Solutions” https://lnkd.in/g9N-f-Di are important, as it describes the impact of policy design for AI Agents. Policy languages like CEDAR, OpenFGA, and OPA are important considerations we need to be thinking about.
Cartography of Generative AI <-amazing map
Agents building agents.
The 𝐌𝐂𝐏 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫 for enterprises.
🔹 Challenges from the current MCP Authorization spec
🔹 Alternative enhancements from folks like Aaron Parecki and Dick Hardt
🔹 Our recommendations for securing MCP in the enterprise
Blockchain
Bhutan adopts Ethereum blockchain for the national identity.
Bhutan becomes first nation to anchor digital ID on Ethereum
Bhutan has migrated its national digital identity system to the Ethereum blockchain, marking a historic step toward decentralized public infrastructure.
IOTA to Secure Digital Identity Framework Connecting 36 Countries and 4.78 Billion Citizens
- IOTA could become the backbone for digital identity verification for over half the world’s population, while Europe’s serves around 450 million people.
- IOTA has spent years building a feeless, energy-efficient distributed ledger purpose-built for machine-to-machine and identity use cases.
Theory meets practice: How can blockchain technology help to scale customer-centric financial services today?
Gravity provides verifiable digital identity wallets that allow users to issue and share Verifiable Credentials securely. Gravity currently operates in Kenya.
Is it customer centric? The service can be used either with or without a smartphone. With a smartphone, beneficiaries create their digital wallet through the Gravity app. Later, when the NGO or financial institution needs to authenticate the beneficiary’s information, the beneficiary can remotely authenticate themselves by responding to a notification through the same app. Without a smartphone, the NGO, or any other trusted organisation wishing to onboard their users using a digital ID, creates the digital wallet on the beneficiary’s behalf. The beneficiary is then issued a QR code, which a service provider can scan at a later date when the identity needs to be authenticated.
National Opportunities
[Video] (Kenya) Stakeholders Workshop for Verifiable Credentials
The Government of Kenya is establishing effective mechanisms of replacing issuance of paper degrees with a Digital Verifiable Credential, which can be securely authenticated using a digital system.
OpenID Foundation Applauds Western Balkans Digital ID Plan
A key accomplishment of the event was the 6 Western Balkan countries agreeing to the Joint Statement on Achieving Western Balkans Six Interoperable Digital ID Wallets and Trust Services. “By agreeing to implement regionally interoperable digital identity wallets, harmonise trust services, and strengthen regulatory and technical capacities, the Western Balkans Six committed to advancing secure and seamless digital access for citizens and businesses, in line with EU eIDAS 2.0 standards.”
Digital Product Passports Towards More Sustainable Futures
In our presentation, we also introduced the Promoting Accelerated Circular Economy through Digital Product Passports (PACE-DPP) project as an applied case study to explore the potential for DPPs.
A Digital Product Passport is a product-specific dataset accessible via a digital carrier. It enables businesses, regulators, and consumers to access key information—such as material composition, environmental impact, production history, and recyclability.
What We Learned Showing Digital IDs for Local Government
Richard Esplin (Head of Product) put together a live demo.
Instead of complex architectures or long timelines, he showed how a city could issue a digital residency credential and use it instantly across departments. From getting a library card to scheduling trash pickup.
Why Digital Identity Frameworks Should Be Public Infrastructure
Digital identity is essential infrastructure, and it deserves the same level of public investment, oversight, and trust as other core systems like roads or utilities.
Interesting
(Indicio) Your authentication dilemma: DIY or off-the-shelf decentralized identity?
There’s a reason Indicio was the first (and still the only) company to launch a complete, off-the-shelf solution for implementing Verifiable Credentials in both the Amazon and Google Cloud Marketplaces: We built a team composed of pioneers and leaders in decentralized identity, engineers and developers deeply engaged with the open source codebases and communities that have shaped this technology. They live and breathe this stuff every day. And even so, it still took years to build an interoperable, multi-credential, multi-protocol, system that can scale to country-level deployments.
(Dock) Why Derived Credentials Are the Future of Digital ID
In our recent live podcast, Richard Esplin (Dock Labs) spoke with Andrew Hughes (VP of Global Standards, FaceTec) and Ryan Williams (Program Manager of Digital Credentialing, AAMVA) about the rollout of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and what comes next.
One idea stood out: derived credentials.
Thoughtful
(Nicky Hickman via Cheqd) Verifiable AI with Self-Sovereign Identity: a Socio-Technical Exploration
As part of the research, two practical outputs were created.
1. Entangled Relationship Guide: considers AI in relation to wider systems including the environment, ecology and non-human stakeholders, drawing on perspectives from indigenous knowledge and socio-environmental research.
2. Human-Centric Relationship Guide: focused on designing AI systems that interact directly with people, addressing themes such as authenticity, authorisation and trust.
(Heather Flanagan) The End of the Global Internet
- Technical fragmentation: differences in protocols, infrastructure, censorship, filtering; sometimes entire national “gateways” or shutdowns.
- Regulatory / governmental fragmentation: national laws around data flows, privacy, platform regulation, online safety, and content moderation diverge sharply.
- Commercial fragmentation: companies facing divergent rules in different markets (privacy, liability, content) so they adapt differently; global products become “local versions.”
A primer from the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) published in 2023 lays this out in detail.
Demystifying JOSE, the JWT Family: JWS, JWE, JWA, and JWK Explained
If you’ve worked with modern authentication or secure data exchange, you’ve undoubtedly encountered JSON Web Tokens, or JWTs. However, if you dig deeper, you may encounter a series of confusing acronyms: JWS, JWE, JWK, JWA, and the umbrella term, JOSE. What do they all mean? How do they relate to each other?
Foundations of Decentralized Identity
Decentralized identity operationalizes these ideas for the digital era. By distributing trust, it reduces dependency on monopolistic platforms. By lowering the cost of verification, it unlocks new forms of commerce. By centering autonomy, it ensures liberty is preserved even as interactions move online.
Wallets and Identity and Money
From Wallets To Passports To Monetization: Your Identity Reimagined
The building blocks are falling into place: regulatory clarity in Europe, purpose-built blockchains like Moca Chain, and applications such as Vyvo that show how identity can be applied across industries. The challenge ahead is making these systems interoperable, user-friendly, and economically compelling.
If wallets truly become passports, and if identity verifications can become income-generating events, then digital identity could shift from being a bureaucratic necessity to a financial opportunity. For users, that means more control, more privacy, and perhaps even more upside from something as simple as proving who they are.
The EU Is Building a Digital Wallet That Ignores Crypto
The omission of stablecoins is disappointing given the parallel rollout of MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets), the EU’s landmark stablecoin legislation. MiCA introduces strong reserve requirements, audit obligations, and licensing for issuers of tokens. It is one of the most comprehensive regulatory frameworks for crypto assets on the planet, and it creates a clear legal pathway for compliant stablecoins. Yet, the EU has chosen not to prioritize them in its plans here.
Company News
SSI startup TransCrypts raises $15M to expand digital identity, credential verification platform
With the new funding, TransCrypts plans to scale its team significantly, focusing on its newly established co-headquarters in downtown Toronto alongside its San Francisco base. The company aims to further develop its credential ecosystem and meet growing demand for trusted, user-controlled identity solutions in an increasingly digitized world.
Research
Self sovereign identity in e-governance: blockchain solutions for fintech compliance and citizen-centric financial services
