Re: Signs of adoption of CCG specifications

Manu: this is encouraging and a tribute to the 8+ hard years that the CCG and its related task forces and workgroups have labored to move these and related standards forward. Change starts with a small group of dedicated people working together, to paraphrase the famous anthropologist Margret Mead, It always does.

Thanks for brightening our morning,

Cheers,
   Phil

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On Jul 30, 2025, at 7:29 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

One signal of a successful specification is when people start building
on it without any engagement with the original community. This is
usually a good sign because it means that the people building on it 1)
conceptually understand why the specification is useful -- that is,
you didn't have to convince them of anything, they understood the
value by just reading the spec/docs, and 2) it's specified well enough
to not need hand-holding for a developer to implement and deploy it.

We've seen this happen twice over the past month or so with
specifications that were incubated in the Credentials Community Group
for market verticals that are typically not represented in this
community.

The first is that Cloudflare has integrated HTTP Message Signatures
for their Verified Bots program. That specification was incubated in
the Credentials Community Group for 8+ years before being placed onto
the standards track at IETF with AnnabelleB and JustinR doing the
lionshare of shepherding it through the IETF process:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/verified-bots-with-cryptography/


It took 11 years from when the spec was introduced in this community
to it getting into production at Cloudflare. HTTP Message Signatures
is a good reminder of how long it can take for a good idea to get
traction.

The second is that agntcy.org, founded by Google, Dell, Red Hat,
Oracle, and Cisco, has just launched their AI Agent protocols program
as a Linux Foundation project. They're using W3C Decentralized
Identifiers and W3C Verifiable Credentials to identify AI agents and
provide digital credentials to them so that they can express their
capabilities to humans and other AI agents in a way that's
cryptographically verifiable:

https://docs.agntcy.org/identity/identity/#standards


Both of those surprised me (in a good way) -- they were not on my
radar at all until they were in production.

-- manu

--
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/

Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/