Identosphere 258 Dec 8-13 2025: LER Testimony • Hiring Standards Architect • Swiss eID early 2026 • EU-Canada ID alliance • TRQP Public Review • OIDF Community
This is the weekly Identosphere Newsletter sharing highlights from around the web covering Decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identity curated by Kaliya Young, Identity Woman.
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Upcoming:
Call for Papers Open Now Open Identity Summit Deadline: January 31st, 2026
The summit takes place May 21–22, 2026 at University of Applied Sciences Dresden (HTW Dresden) in Dresden, Germany
Join us at the 1EdTech Digital Credentials Summit in Philadelphia, February 18-20, 2026.
DIF Unconference Africa (an IIW Regional Event) Feb 24-26, 2026 Cape Town
Internet Identity Workshop #42, April 28-30, 2026, Mountain View California
Agentic Internet Workshop #2, May 1, 2026, Mountain View California
Hiring:
Affindi: Standards Architect
20 other positions - https://www.affinidi.com/careers
Written Testimony on Learning and Employment Records:
Hearing on Building a Talent Marketplace: How LERs Empower Workers and Expand Opportunity US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development Presented by Alex Kaplan December 10, 2025
The choice before us is clear: we can build a verified credential infrastructure that enables AI to expand opportunity for millions of Americans, or we can allow AI to perpetuate the inefficiencies of our current talent ecosystem.
Switzerland: E-ID set to go live in early 2026
On December 6, 2024, the Swiss Federal Council made decisions regarding the technical implementation of the Confederation’s new electronic identity proof (e-ID) and the underlying operational infrastructure. A press release [1] describes a two-stage
(Dave Birch) Digital Identity Lesson for the Day no. 94
𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 “𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐃” 𝐢𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐲 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞, 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬. Denver man was just charged with spoofing Colorado’s digital ID app to forge driver’s licenses and open lines of credit. Story here: https://lnkd.in/e5TecUCe
EU and Canada Map Out Interoperable Digital ID Wallets
The European Union and Canada are turning their digital partnership into concrete work on interoperable digital identity wallets, using a new Memorandum of Understanding on digital credentials and trust services to frame cross-border pilots and standards alignment. The first meeting of the Canada-EU Digital Partnership Council took place in Montreal on December 8, co-chaired by Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon and European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen.
Standards
ToIP Announces Public Review 02 of the Trust Registry Query Protocol (TRQP) Specification V2.0
The Trust Registry Query Protocol (TRQP) is a lightweight, read-only protocol for making fast, efficient queries for authoritative data from trust registries. It is often described as “DNS for trust.” Just as DNS name servers serve name domains, TRQP trust registries serve trust domains (also known as digital trust ecosystems).
A MyTerms Summary
The MyTerms standard also says that both sides will use machine agents to make agreements. These can be as simple as browser plug-ins on the individual side and server plug-ins on the corporate side. They can also be AI agents, which is why it is opportune for the standard to be published in an age when AI is still a new and rapidly evolving—for both companies and individuals.
Announcing the 2026 OpenID Foundation Community Representatives Election
- Nominations open: Monday, December 8, 2025
- Nominations close: Friday, December 26, 2025
- Election begins: Monday, December 29, 2025
[Report] G20 TechSprint 2025: Trust and integrity in scalable and open finance
Digital identity solutions for secure and trusted finance
G20 TechSprint 2025: Innovative approaches from shortlisted finalists
Meeco - By providing portable, verifiable and privacy-preserving credentials, the platform builds
trust and unlocks a wide range of identity use cases for individuals and businesses.
Walt.id - Walt.id delivers an open source decentralised identity and wallet infrastructure that extends interoperability across payment systems.
What I Wish I Knew When I Started in Identity
The most common thing I hear from people in their first six months is some variant of: “I didn’t realize how big this was.”
And because it’s big, it’s also intimidating. The learning curve feels like a hill that grows steeper as you climb it. Newcomers oscillate between excitement—because identity really is fascinating—and frustration, because every answer seems to introduce a new question.
Dock Labs Year in Review 2025: Digital ID’s Breakout Year
This yearly review reflects on how the market evolved, how our strategy aligned with these shifts, and what it reveals about where digital identity is heading next. On the way, we’ll discuss the move toward reusable digital identity, the growing demand for stronger authentication, the emergence of AI agent identity, and the rise of reusable organizational identity.
ArgonAuths x Human Colossus: Finalists at HackNation 2025 — Redefining Trust in the Digital Public Sphere
We are thrilled to share that Team “Sigmion” - joint forces of Argonauths and Human Colossus – has been selected as one of the three finalists in the Prawda w Sieci (“Truth on the Web”) challenge, held under the patronage of Centralny Ośrodek Informatyki (COI), the institution behind Poland’s digital-services and identity initiative mObywatel.
(Indicio) Game over, traditional identity authentication — game on, Verifiable Credentials
The result is the growth of “Fraud-as-a-Service (FaaS), a global market where identity forgery, credential spoofing, and document manipulation are packaged and sold on demand.”
Stop doing identity authentication the same way and shift to decentralized identity and Verifiable Credentials for identity and document authentication.
(SpruceID) How Strong UX Turns Digital ID Into Strong Security
Usability is a security requirement. And for those building the next generation of digital identity, recognizing that truth changes how we plan, deploy, and measure success. Read on to learn how treating usability as a core security principle strengthens adoption, accessibility, and trust in digital identity systems.
(EDRi) Rushed EU eID Wallet risks privacy and security: Calls for safeguards are getting ignored in hasty eIDAS implementation
From a visit to the doctor to public transport tickets , the European eID will handle our most sensitive personal data in a wide range of every-day applications. Yet, speed seems more important to the European Commission than a properly functioning eID system that is safe & secure to use.
When destinations start thinking: how the WorldModel becomes the next big category in themed entertainment
Imagine arriving at a destination that understands you. Not because it tracks you or because an app predicted your behaviour, but because the place itself behaves with awareness.
It is the reason mega-projects in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the United States are now explicitly asking for one thing: a venue-wide, multi-venue, multi-campus intelligence layer that makes the environment coherent.
SAP Self-Sovereign Identity Product Page
Smart ring maker Oura looks to ride recent investments into digital identity market
In 2023, Oura acquired Proxy, a U.S. identity tech startup that had previously absorbed smart ring startup Motiv, signaling an interest in authentication use cases for the Oura ring.
[Podcast] Crypto Altruists Episode 203 - Privado ID - Building Trust Between Humans and AI Agents with Blockchain-Powered Decentralized Identity
In this episode, Evin shares powerful insights from her vast experience about why decentralized identity matters deeply, how blockchain-driven privacy solutions are essential for safeguarding our digital lives, how Web3 can empower the one billion people who lack proof of identity, and why Privado’s Billions Network and Quadratic Accelerator are game changers—not just for Web3, but for the responsible evolution of AI as well.
[article] (Biometric Update) Turing Institute introduces Digital ID Safety Pack to protect against common threats
The Alan Turing Institute’s Cyber Threat Observatory hosted an information-rich webinar on Trustworthy Digital Infrastructure for Identity Systems. Over the three-hour webinar insights on face morphing, fraud, digital identity in Sri Lanka and Ethiopia, threat reporting, and much more, were delivered.
[report] Cyber Threat Observatory for National Identity Systems Quarterly Report: Generative AI and the Rise of Credential Fraud in Digital Public Infrastructure November 2025
This report provides a comprehensive and strategic analysis of the escalating threats posed by synthetic identities and deepfake-enabled credential fraud within Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). As DPI systems, particularly digital identity platforms, become foundational to public service delivery, their risk exposure also increases.
[Research] Privacy evaluation of the European Digital Identity Wallet’s Architecture and Reference Framework
The paper conducts a comprehensive privacy analysis of the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) across three key use cases, identifying multiple privacy risks including linkability, identifiability, and excessive data disclosure that stem from inherent design choices like SD-JWT/mDOC formats and Wallet Unit Attestations. The authors demonstrate how advanced Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, particularly Zero-Knowledge Proofs, could mitigate these privacy risks while maintaining the high assurance levels required for regulated identity use cases.
[Research] How does the EU Digital Identity Wallet change the risk of over-sharing data? A Dutch perspective.
This paper analyzes the risk of over-sharing personal data through the EU Digital Identity Wallet based on expert interviews, identifying that users may share more data than strictly necessary due to factors including user capabilities, loss of context awareness, data quality issues, and the ease of sharing mechanisms. Despite the DIW’s goal of giving citizens control over personal data sharing, the research reveals that multiple aspects influence over-sharing risk and require deeper understanding to effectively protect user privacy in practice. launch of the e-ID, with the first delivery planned for 2026.