Identosphere 254 Nov 9-16: Indian Aadhaar # -> VCs • Swiss Gov Docs • AI and Identity • SSI + AI Agents (not Blockchain) • DIF election results
This is the weekly Identosphere Newsletter sharing highlights from around the web covering Decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identity curated by Kaliya Young, Identity Woman.
Government ID Projects
SWIYU (Swiss Government) Trust Protocol based on VCs
This document defines the publicly consumable technical specification of the trust protocol, is based on VCs and was created as an initial concept for the swiyu Trust Infrastructure. The aim is to provide a straight-forward solution allowing a governing body (trust issuer) to confirm the identity of issuers and verifiers.
swiyu Trust Infrastructure: Interoperability profile
Implement MFA using swiyu, the Swiss E-ID with Duende IdentityServer, ASP.NET Core Identity and .NET Aspire
With OpenAge, k-ID presents itself as one big interoperable solution for age checks
Funke challenge by SPRIND - Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen.
Last Funke conference recording: https://lnkd.in/e4Qne9Zc
The funded teams just dropped their codebases publicly — a rare chance to peek under the hood of real EUDI Wallet implementations built with passion, specs, and caffeine. The best: all under Apache 2.0 license, so feel free to work with it. OpenCode Repo: https://lnkd.in/e9kXnYsc
New Aadhaar App: How to use UIDAI’s new Aadhaar App for face authentication, offline QR, and verifiable credentials
The app promises a safer and smarter way to use an Aadhaar card anytime, anywhere. It allows residents to access all their Aadhaar details on their smartphones and share the data in a verifiable credential format.
Biometric locking/unlocking: This feature secures biometric authentication by locking biometric data. Once enabled, biometrics remain locked until the Aadhaar holder temporarily unlocks or disables the system.
UIDAI’s Latest Aadhaar App Turns Your Phone Into a Secure Digital ID Wallet: What’s New
Kantara Achieves Historic First: Accredited to Certify Against the UK DIATF
Statement on Bill C-4: Balancing Economic Relief with Privacy Considerations (Canada)
Framework vs. Credential: Choosing the Right Model for State Identity
Explore why a flexible, standards-aligned framework offers the strongest foundation for modern, privacy-preserving digital identity.
Digital identity and the UK government’s announceability problem
Digital public services and infrastructure are complex sociotechnical systems. Getting them right is the result of thousands of small product design decisions. Policy professionals are not product specialists. To ensure the civil service is delivering what they want, ministers need to get much closer to product delivery teams — and demand that announcements they sign off on give teams the space they need to deliver at speed, not create inertia.
DPI Explored
From Backend to Citizen: Design Systems as the Translation Layer for Digital Government
- Conditions and structures that help a design system emerge, be sustained, and delivered
- Understanding design systems in government beyond visual standardization—the “behind the scenes” elements that make a design system truly systemic
- The value of design systems—how they progress and are shared across government
Thoughtful
Beyond the Glass Cage: Why Self-Sovereign Identity, Not Blockchains, Will Power Agent Autonomy
The choice between blockchains and self-sovereign identity isn’t just technical — it’s philosophical and practical. It determines whether we repeat the centralizing mistakes of the past, just distributed across more servers, or finally build the genuinely decentralized future we’ve been promised.
Identity Heros Podcast: Heather Flanagan
(David Kelts) Categories of the Mechanisms of Trust Management + Trust Vectors
- Centralized trust anchor (one CA authority)
- Hierarchical PKI (common trust anchor)
- Federated (multiple trust anchors authorized by the Trust Framework). A Trust Registry may be the mechanism for dispensing trust anchors for inspection. There may be a convention for querying any participant about conformance.
- Decentralized Trust (Smart Contracts as trust anchors (?) coordinated by the Trust Framework)
- Free Market (lack of conventions or mechanisms; can create reliance on reputational trust only)
Questions of Readers of this Blog Post: Are there any other Trust Vectors overlooked?
Trust Was Never the Problem - Proof Was
One expert put it bluntly: “Lack of data ownership and protections is limiting blockchain’s impact. Institutions need privacy for regulatory compliance. Without protections, data is freely available.”
Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralised Identity The backbone of proof-based trust. These allow an issuer to digitally sign data about you (a credential), which you store and later present as needed. “Verify once, use everywhere.”
Identity and Payments
(Fime) Payment tokenization. Has a tipping point been reached and what are the implications?
Payment tokenization has strong crossovers to the emerging work on payments within identity initiatives such as the European Identity Wallet. Whilst initially appearing quite separate, the core topics of authentication, trust and assurance lie deep within both topics.
(Signet) Verifiable Credentials Management
The verifiable credentials model handles the data fields used in the VC Management API endpoints for managing enrollments, credentials, and payments. It enables secure enrollment of users, issuance of payment authorization credentials, and processing of verifiable payments.
eIDAS
(walt.id) [Report] eIDAS2 Implementers Guide
In 2016 the eIDAS (electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services) regulation created a framework for cross‑border electronic identification. It focused on a small set of trust services, notably electronic signatures, and left wide latitude to Member States. As a result, national implementations diverged, interoperability remained limited and citizens lacked a harmonised digital identity. During the pandemic, physical presence requirements made identity proofing difficult and fragmentation slowed adoption beyond the public sector.
(Katryna Dow: MeeCo) 🇪🇺Part 2: EUDI Large Scale Pilots Final Reports 📑
This week we feature the results published by the EU Digital Wallet Consortium (EWC) where the focus was on travel ⛴️ ✈️ and payments 💶
The great news is the “technical” progress, confirmation on infrastructure and interoperability - these are all incredible milestones. ✅
But....now the hard work - adoption - user experience - the “so what” 🤷♂️
Positively 29% is high when considered in the context of “tipping point”
Company News
(NEC) Indicio Secures Investment from NEC X, Accelerating A New Era of User-Controlled Digital Identity
Cardano Summit Day Two Recap: Trust and Digital Identity to Drive Blockchain Towards Enterprise Adoption
Christoph Schneider of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation explored the infrastructure requirements of building trust-minimized distributed systems in enterprise environments, outlining the importance of safe, secure, scalable and reliable infrastructure, stating businesses have “a lot to gain in this decentralized system.” The panel emphasized that trust minimized doesn’t mean less trust, but rather more verification. “Now is the time for corporates, and or banks to get ready for trade and payments in four or five years,” Blockdaemon’s Stefan Schmitt urged. “That will be verifiable proof on chain, authentication and distributed ledger payments.”
Andreessen Horowitz Urges US Treasury to Adopt Decentralized Digital ID for Crypto AML
In its submission to FinCEN, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a16z proposed a fundamental shift away from the traditional model where every financial service provider must collect and report detailed personal identifiable information. This old model, the firm argues, creates massive, centralized honeypots of data (like names, addresses, and social security numbers) that are prime targets for hackers.
The firm’s proposed solution centers on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Digital Credentials (VDCs). This user-centric model separates the act of identity verification from the act of identity use.
Protocols using Verifiable Credentials
Eclipse Decentralized Claims Protocol v1.012 November 2025
Dataspaces require the ability to communicate participant identities and credentials to secure data access. This specification defines a set of protocols for asserting participant identities, issuing verifiable credentials, and presenting verifiable credentials using a decentralized architecture for verification and trust.
Learning the Lingo of Identity
Entity Resolution: What is it and why is it important?
How Does Entity Resolution Work?
Entity Resolution and Customer Data Accuracy
Challenges in Achieving Effective Entity Resolution
Entity Resolution Use Cases: Real-World Applications Across Industries
Entity Resolution Techniques: How Businesses Achieve Data Matching Accuracy
AgriTrust: a Federated Semantic Governance Framework for Trusted Agricultural Data Sharing
The “AgData Paradox”—where agricultural data remains siloed despite its recognized value due to lack of trust and interoperability—is addressed by AgriTrust, a federated semantic governance framework combining multi-stakeholder governance with a blockchain-agnostic ontology for true semantic interoperability. Case studies across Brazilian coffee, soy, and beef supply chains demonstrate that AgriTrust enables verifiable provenance, automates compliance, and creates new revenue streams, transforming data sharing from a trust dilemma into a governed, automated operation.
5 things Indicio is excited about at Phocuswright 2025
Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs)
AI and Verifiable Credentials for travel customer service
Age assurance technology in travel
Government DTC-2 type deployments
Building for the European Union Digital Identity (EUDI)
Humanity Protocol Integrates Open Finance into Human ID
Humanity Protocol, an on-chain digital identity solution provider, today announced a new integration that brings together Mastercard’s open finance connectivity with Humanity Protocol’s identity verification platform Human ID.
DIF Steering Committee Election Results
JC Ebersbach (identinet)
Matt McKinney (ArcBlock, AIGNE)
Eric Scouten (Adobe)
Sam Curren (Indicio)
Rouven Heck (Fidenexum)
Markus Sabadello (DanubeTech)
AI and Identity
(MeeCo) The future of commerce isn’t just digital — it’s agentic.
Call for Participants: Peer Benchmarking of MCP Governance
In particular, we are looking for enterprises that currently have (or are quickly approaching) ~100+ MCP Servers.
The new vital AI fraud signal: ‘Customer Present’ vs. ‘Customer NOT Present’
Personal AI
A theme throughout all those writings is the need for all of us to be on top of our digital lives: how we record and archive it, how we manage it, and how we use it to better inform and interact with each other and with the organizations we engage. To my knowledge, nothing yet addresses that collection needs, and is ours and not just a service by some giant. If you think I have that wrong, tell me how.
The India Aadhaar app integratin with VCs is a huge step forward for user controled identity. Being able to lock biometrics and share data in verifiable credential format could really change how people manage their digital ID.