[MINUTES] VCs for Education 2025-09-29

Meeting Summary: kte-hamg-bpj (2025-09-29)

*Attendees:* Alex Higuera, David Ward, Dmitri Zagidulin, Eric Shepherd,
Hiroyuki Sano, Ildiko Mazar, James Chartrand, Kayode Ezike, Nate Otto,
Phillip Long, Ted Thibodeau Jr

*Summary:*

This meeting of the VC Edu task force focused on defining "wallets" in the
context of verifiable credentials and discussing alternative names. The
discussion covered functional definitions, key features, and the challenges
of using the term "wallet."

*Topics Covered:*

   - *Defining "Wallet":* The meeting aimed to define the functional
   criteria of a credential wallet.
   - *Alternative Names:* The team discussed whether "wallet" is the best
   term for this technology.
   - *Core Functionality:* The meeting listed and debated the core
   functions that a wallet should have.
   - *Upcoming Topics:* The team also discussed potential future discussion
   topics

*Key Points:*

   - *Functional Definition:* The proposed functional definition of a
   wallet includes managing keys, receiving and storing credentials, using
   standardized APIs, displaying credentials, and servicing external requests
   from unknown parties.
   - *Interoperability:* Interoperability, specifically how wallets export
   and import credentials, is an essential function of a credential wallet.
   - *Name Debate:* The term "wallet" is easy to explain and understand, it
   may also bring to mind cryptocurrency.
   - *Credential Manager:* There was a discussion about having an
   underlying credentials manager that serves the function of a wallet but is
   more like a password manager in use.
   - *Verification:* It was suggested that verification should be a
   function provided by wallets.
   - *Future Topics:* Future discussion topics include self-issued
   credentials, credential APIs, and login/sign-in functionality using wallets.

Text:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-vcs-for-education-2025-09-29.md

Video:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-vcs-for-education-2025-09-29.mp4
*kte-hamg-bpj (2025-09-29 10:58 GMT-4) - Transcript* *Attendees*

Alex Higuera, David Ward, Dmitri Zagidulin, Eric Shepherd, Hiroyuki Sano,
Ildiko Mazar, James Chartrand, Kayode Ezike, Nate Otto, Phillip Long, Ted
Thibodeau Jr
*Transcript*

Ildiko Mazar: Hello. It's very nice to see you twice.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Hello. Hi, Alico. Yeah, I'm presenting on a different
screen.

Ildiko Mazar: People look

Eric Shepherd: Is it just the three of us here?

Dmitri Zagidulin: We're early.

Eric Shepherd: We're early. Okay.

Dmitri Zagidulin: I think a lot of people as a presenter and as a chair I
usually try to start meetings two minutes or three minutes after the hour.

Dmitri Zagidulin: But as an attendee and I think a lot of people are like
that, a lot of people show up, four to six minutes after the meeting
starts. Okay, copy that, Ted. just because usually the first couple of
minutes of a standards call it always bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo
bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo boiler plate.

Eric Shepherd: Mhm.

Dmitri Zagidulin: And in some groups you ask for volunteers to scribe and
so a lot of people just show up late to miss all of that.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So there's a tension we want to start early but we also
want people to file in so it's like that.

Ildiko Mazar: Not to mention that this technology doesn't always work.

Ildiko Mazar: You click on and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Exactly. on the west coast it is.

Ildiko Mazar: for you it's the first thing in the morning right on that
side of the pond. It's 8 o'clock a.m. in some of the states.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. on the east coast it's a more tolerable 11.

Ildiko Mazar: Yeah. Yeah.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. So, people filing in. We'll get started shortly.

Eric Shepherd: Dimmitri, where are these presentations filed? I should
probably know this,…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, great question.

Eric Shepherd: but …

Dmitri Zagidulin: So, what I was…

Ildiko Mazar: Keep going. Mhm.

Dmitri Zagidulin: what we usually do is email the slides after the
presentation just for those that haven't attended…

Eric Shepherd: that's perfect. Yeah. Thank you.
00:05:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: but also in addition we paste them in chat. So, for
example, slides are here in Google account. I wonder So, if you a message,
those that join the call after still get to see the message unlike other
messages. So, that's really good to know. All right, it is three minutes
after the hour.

Dmitri Zagidulin: we might as well get started. welcome everyone to the
weekly VC Edu task force These calls excellent. we also have a Google drive
for it. Okay, I'll copy those links there too. these links are recorded.
anyone can join the calls. You don't have to be a member of W3C or the
community group, although you should be if you want to make any substantive
contributions to the spec. reach out to myself, Ildico or Simony. U will
help help you get started. and as always, we're operating under the W3C
code of conduct. we usually go through introductions and reintroductions if
anybody wants to say hi or haven't introduced themselves in a while.

Dmitri Zagidulin: If anybody's new here, feel free to raise any community
announcements? there's the perpetual announcement that we have IW coming up
in the week of October 20th 24th and we also have the annual in-person W3C
conference called TAC technical planner something conference in happening
in Japan in November this year. So, if you can make it, a lot of the CCG
folks will be there. I won't be able to be there this year, but, it's
always a good time. All right. in that case, let's get to our main agenda.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So today I wanted to talk a little more about wallets,
what some possible functional definitions of wallets could be and continue
the conversation of hey, could we have a better name than wallet? so…

Ildiko Mazar: Yeah.

Dmitri Zagidulin: since this is a smaller group, we'll make the discussion
informal though I figured I'd have slides anyways just for conversation
topics. So, please feel free to jump in at any point. Either type in chat
or better yet, raise your hand and then, they'll get you in the queue. All
right. So, functional technical definition, better name. So, what's a
wallet?

Dmitri Zagidulin: First question to ask is what do we think of the name
wallet or credentials wallet and how have we been defining it in the
community right so I think going to conferences or even elevator and taxi
conversations what do you do I work on credential wallets what is that
how's that been working out for us and this is a genuine question I'm
curious to hear from some of you do people understand

Dmitri Zagidulin: what credentials and credentials wallets are. the bene
some of the benefits which is the reason we have been calling them wallets
is we can take advantage of the skillorphism which is resemblance to a real
world analogy. So we can say just in your physical wallet you store various
cards like your driver's licenses and your membership cards, your coupons
and stuff.

Dmitri Zagidulin: A credential wallet is similar. It's an app. You store
things in it. And you can present your identity documents,…

Ildiko Mazar: It does.

Dmitri Zagidulin: your membership documents, things like that. Drawbacks of
course is the wallet immediately makes people think of cryptocurrency.
yeah. yeah. 100%. a because outside okay.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So Eric is saying in chat so for Eric it doesn't
immediately skew but with a lot of people that I talk to and partly this
depends on the audience right if you're talking to more sort of like
internet aware and web3 aware folks their mind immediately jumps to
cryptocurrency wallet and…
00:10:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: in general if you talk about something like Google wallet
or something like Samsung wallet, there's the notion of you tap to pay at
Starbucks and Hold on one second. So, somebody's here for the dogs. Nixie
go.

Ildiko Mazar: Yeah, I guess to me as well the wallet is more like the Apple
wallet where you store your boarding passes etc.

Ildiko Mazar: And this is my goto when I try to explain to somebody what I
do. never thought of cryptocurrency to be honest.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Excellent. Okay.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So, That's good. so this is good feedback. this is a good
item of and you're absolutely right. So, if not currency wallets,…

Dmitri Zagidulin: a lot of people think Google wallet and Apple wallet.
Absolutely. I agree. I'm curious though like Eric James, how have you found
the term credential wallet hurts more than it helps other way around?

Ildiko Mazar: Hey, heat.

Eric Shepherd: Demetri, if I could just jump in here. just…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Please, please.

Eric Shepherd: because I've spent a lot of my career trying to work out
names for products and stuff and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: And names are hard.

Eric Shepherd: the…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Ha.

Eric Shepherd: what first of all we need to do is define the audience. So
if we said the audience was young adults, we would use a different name
that if we said all adults and if we said all adults what's the target
population? I do think that credentials are a struggle for most young
adults and adults. they would tend to think of other things, I agree with
the idea that wallets are very pervasive on apps and I went to the movies
the other night and I had the movie tickets in my wallet. it feels like a
very natural term to me. So, whenever I'm asked about it, I say, "Well, you
got a wallet on your phone.

Eric Shepherd: this just stores your qualifications and your degrees and
stuff like that and people get it pretty quickly. I think if you say
credential wallet, the word credential just feels to me like it over
complicates it. It's a term that we all understand readily, so there's an
expression in English I think it's called the common man or the average
man. And it's the type of man that you would meet on the Clappam omlab bus.
And so, we could all fly to London and ride the Clappam omla bus and ask
them or we could set up some virtual panels so we get the definitions of
the different target audience personas and then just run a synthetic panel
to run the various names.

Eric Shepherd: But I can just say from my point of view wallets is very
easy to explain. Credential is harder.

Ildiko Mazar: Totally. Yeah.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Excellent point.

Eric Shepherd: So we'll see you in Clappam.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Would love to.

Ildiko Mazar: I think it also depends on the context, if you're having a
conversation about how to innovate education or credentiing or support
skills portability or skills recognition lifelong learning then it's a
different entry point to the description of the concept of a credential
wallet than if you start from the technical point of view which you guys
are much more likely to enter into the conversation from

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, it's a really good point. J James or Alex, I'm
curious since you have this conversation a lot. have you found the term
credential wallet to be helpful or confusing? as Eric points out that in
some cases the term credentials is more confusing than the term wallet.

James Chartrand: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that number one, I
don't think there are a lot of people just overall talking about
credentials. it's not like I actually have a lot of conversations with
people about the credentials they're receiving because very few people are
receiving credentials. they don't have any. So it's a little bit hard I
think for them to relate to what's being talked about…
00:15:00

Ildiko Mazar: Okay.

James Chartrand: if they can't think to a time when they themselves
received a credential of some sort like a digital credential.

Dmitri Zagidulin: right?

James Chartrand: Maybe it's different in Europe I'm speaking for myself in
Canada where we don't have digital driver's licenses or really anything
like that. We did have the closest thing I think that we had were the
vaccination certificates during co which but then they were kept in your
Apple wallet typically. but and I guess part of the reason I mentioned
those is that they actually were verifiable credentials and they were
verified by a verification app but sorry I'm wandering off badly here.

James Chartrand: It looked like Ilico was going to jump in and…

James Chartrand: speak maybe to the fact that people in Europe have digital
credentials than we might have over here in North America.

Ildiko Mazar: No, but I think you mentioned something that is quite
important the verifiable aspect like that's when it gets difficult to
separate just any online repository or…

Ildiko Mazar: of some sort of documents versus verifiable credentials that
have this layer of security and verifiability. That's where I stop
explaining

Alex Higuera: just to answer and piggyback on what James was saying, I've
also seen that people have a more intuitive understanding on what a wallet
is versus credential. But I think it's because a wallet has a visual
physical component that people already understand, whereas a credential
might be, I don't know, people can make analogies for what it would be. if
you were to use a wallet, it could be money or a verification system, a
currency exchange, what there are different ways of explaining it that I
think is the reason why people are confused on…

Alex Higuera: what credentials are because there hasn't really been a
physical analogy to help people understand

Dmitri Zagidulin: Makes sense.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Makes sense. and to touch in what James said that not
only does it depend on audience, depends on the times. not that long ago
and not that long ago, most folks in the US were not familiar with QR codes
and native phone camera support for QR codes were not there.

Dmitri Zagidulin: And so, if you happen to have been, writing using apps
myself and Alex have, back in 2018 or so, there was still that friction of
what is a QR code, how do I scan it? versus now when it's built into the
cameras when a lot of the apps that we use such as WhatsApp and…

Eric Shepherd: that we use. That doesn't work.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Snapchat signal and so on add another device by scanning
this QR code when COVID and the vaccinations test passes where QR codes now
a lot more people are familiar with it similarly to get back to wallets

Dmitri Zagidulin: Now that EU is passing European Union identity wallet
legislation and for example just the other day the Swiss EID the electronic
ID referendum has passed and interestingly passed with a very narrow 4%
over half margin so we'll see what happens there but my point is as these
legislations pass and these conversations continue especially in the
European Union possibly more people will be familiar with wallets please
yeah

Eric Shepherd: Dimmitri, could I just jump in again? I think another aspect
here is who's going to provide the wallets?

Dmitri Zagidulin: Nice.

Eric Shepherd: So, is it going to be a commercial market where there's lots
of different wallets? So, to David's point, there was a separate app for
some of the COVID vaccinations. So, if there's going to be a standardized
wallet, then probably the name matters. But if we're going to see lots of
vendors providing their own kind of wallets I think ASU provides pocket so
if we're going to see that then it really doesn't matter. It's up to the
vendors to select their name and…
00:20:00

Eric Shepherd: this community and the others involved in verifiable can say
credential wallet because we all know what we're talking about and then it
would be just up to the vendors to pick the name that they think would be
successful.

Dmitri Zagidulin: That's a good point.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Agreed. Phil mentions in chat that the first person
credential project and the sort of issuer registry project uses the term
cards instead of credentials which I like that might be worth experimenting
with in terms of elevator and taxi conversations though I do wonder if
credit cards again come to mind but that's cool. We should play with that.

Phillip Long: just as an addition there…

Phillip Long: if I might. and I think Eric has a good. Is my voice not my
Okay,…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. No,…

Dmitri Zagidulin: you're okay. You're okay. Go ahead.

Phillip Long: I agree that is and my both agree I think for what the
suggestion is that there may well be multiple wallet rs. but I think an
understanding of what the core meaning minimal requirements for what a
wallet has regardless of the provider is the part that we probably should
be paying most attention to…

Phillip Long: because I expect they'll be doing additional enhancements and
value ads for particular markets or types of credentials. But there has to
be something that is reliably consistent among the different providers of
wallets that give you a boundary about whether you can expect this
particular credential or that one to work. D. That's it.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, makes sense.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Makes sense. Excellent conversation and we'll come back
to this in just a bit. But back to can we have so assuming we understand
what a credential wallet is on this call. Can we come up with a functional
definition as in these are the criteria. This is what a wallet does. So
let's start with some possibilities.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Let's start with some functional criteria that
immediately come to mind and with most of these you'll see that those are
core functionalities but alone not sufficient to be a wallet. Let's start
with what's a wallet? It's an app or service that stores credentials. I
usually start with that. when Phil in chat asks isn't core functional
criteria interoperability based yes but the interoperability of what right
so what we were discussing is what are the interoperable operations what
are the functions that a wallet must do before we can talk about
interoperability.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So storing credentials right receiving and storing
credentials is one of them. also sort of corresponds with holder role in
the VC data model specification. Although personally honestly I don't
really like holder in the sense that I find that subject or receiver and
presenter tends to be less confusing. But going to put that aside. So
storing credentials is clearly a core functionality of a wallet alone it's
not sufficient because any sort of file system can store credentials right
in that perspective from storage I can store a credential that I receive in
Google Drive or just on my desktop right the storing necessary but not
sufficient and as Kyod points out in chat controller is also a really
important term

Dmitri Zagidulin: in this with regards to holder. what about something that
can display credentials or render credentials? So also core function,
right? we need apps that for any of this to work, we need to come up with a
common vocabulary of this is how we're going to display these things,
credentials and cards. just to provide a counter example that just
rendering is not really sufficient, right? We can have apps that render
credentials standalone that are not wallets.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So for example, this is verifier plus which is just open-
general purpose verification software and I can just paste the raw source
code of a credential into it and it'll render the credentials for me and
verify it. So this is a credential aware app. It can display them but it by
itself is not a wallet. what about wallet is something that speaks
credential related APIs right kind of similar to what Phil is saying in
chat depends on the data model so we have at least three standardized APR
and actually more we're also going to say I forgot
00:25:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: about VidCcom. So we have the CCG credential life cycle
API. we have the open ID federations open for credential issuance and we
have the up andcoming digital credentials API that is being implemented by
OS and browser vendors. essentially the big three, Apple, and tragically
Mozilla has declined from implementing it so far. So it's just the big
three for the moment. but it is a digital credentials API. it's really
important. It's provides some necessary link between the browser and mobile
apps.

Dmitri Zagidulin: And we're going to dive deeper into a digital credential
API here on these Similarly, for requesting credentials, we have these
three or four standardized APIs that allow other apps or services to
request credentials from a user's wallets. what about managing keys? it
turns out those that's not the first thing that comes to mind when talking
about wallets. Certainly doesn't come up in most elevator or u taxi
conversations unless the elevator is at a credentials convention which is
where most of my elevator conversations happen. It turns out that managing
cryptographic keys is also a core functionality of a wallet. and why is
that right?

Dmitri Zagidulin: we can have wallet that doesn't manage keys on behalf of
a user. this is what we were discussing. But basically a lot of pro
issuance processes require if they're going to issue to a given person to a
g given did decentralized identifier they require during the presentation
ceremony during the issuance ceremony rather for the wallet to essentially
did off request to prove control of a cryptographic

Dmitri Zagidulin: material proof control over a did. wallets can also
perform authentication. So login with wallet, they can encrypt and decrypt
things. some advanced functionality that we're going to touch on. and again
you're starting to notice a theme managing keys on behalf of the user
insufficient by itself So as counter examples, what about the operating
system keychain? most of us as users don't really use see the keychain,
right? there's the old saying that I personally enjoy that if a normal
internet user encounters an IP address, something has gone wrong. Meaning,
IP addresses are not userfacing. They're not something that a normal person
encounters unless something goes wrong, unless there's an error on the page.

Dmitri Zagidulin: and it's usually opaque and confusing. same thing just
like we don't expect normal people to deal with IP addresses directly, we
don't expect people to deal with DIDs directly or keys. So for most of us,
when was the last time you opened let's say the Windows keychain service
the Mac OS keychain service? I had to open it I don't know last year or so
because I'm a mobile developer and it was for signing in fact one of the
wallets that I work on. But in general most people aren't familiar with it.

Dmitri Zagidulin: But operating systems keychain services do manage keys on
behalf of wallet under the hood. similarly an even more familiar example
signal or WhatsApp or Snapchat or any of those apps they actually have
cryptographic keys for each user. that's what happens when you add a device
by ning a keycha by scanning a QR code. There's a key exchange in the
background and cryptographic keys are how these apps authenticate clients,
users, chat rooms and so encrypt in the case of signal. So for each account
that joins they generate encryption keys and so on.
00:30:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: the so magic key is important by itself is not
sufficient. and would we call signal a wallet? I wouldn't. Why is that? The
critical distinction here is that signal manages keys for its own internal
use. It does not service key related requests from external app. There's no
way at least at the moment to say login with signal or even more
importantly sign this document with your signal key or encrypt this
document with your signal key so that another recipient can decrypt it.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So I would say a narrowing down of that is an external
requests that are related to credentials looking at it from that lens.
wallet is an app that can service external requests from unknown and
untrusted parties. Now, we're starting to get down to the heart of what's a
wallet because it differentiates it from operating systems, key chains, and
signal. They manage keys but don't service requests.

Dmitri Zagidulin: And the other sub subtle but important part is it's easy
enough without any specifications to wire together proprietary integrations
of I have my document here and I can put a button that says transfer this
document to some other proprietary service, that's easy enough. it's not
repeatable, doesn't use standard APIs, but most importantly and subtly
there's that trust relationship. if it's a limited integration, both of the
parties know each other. They typically sign legal documents.

Dmitri Zagidulin: What differentiates a credential wallet from just regular
integrations is that the party that's going to be issuing credentials into
your wallet. And more importantly, the parties that are going to be asking
for credentials, we don't know them yet. The issuer has no idea who's going
to be verifying. and the verifier parties can be So managing risk for the
user managing the identity and the reputation of people handing out
credentials or people requesting credentials even more importantly that's a
key functionality on part of a wallet.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So like I mentioned in addition receiving and requesting
credentials once we have these wallets and we realize that they manage keys
on behalf of a user and they service requests now we can start getting into
really interesting stuff like hey can we use our wallets to docuine right
as in general to sign contracts to sign any sort of PDFs So word documents,
sure, why not? large part of what a wallet does is sign stuff on behalf of
the user. What about since wallets know how to perform data authentication
during the course of issuance?

Dmitri Zagidulin: can we do a login with wallet and even if in case you're
using a cryptographic based access control system, could we do a request
access to this document through the wallet? So, I mean, I'm biased. I would
say yes. and just to give an example of what that looks like, here is again
open source application that provides login requests that standardized
wallets can present. So this is a login with wallet QR code and this is the
underlying JSON and you would scan it with the wallet and it would come
back to this app.
00:35:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: this is a request for a authorization capability and this
is a issue request of hey wallet can you please sign this document? Okay
but this is advanced functionality we'll come back to that hopefully later
on. So summarized to start the conversation my proposal for a functional
definition of wallet it's an app or a service cloud or native or whatever
manages keys on behalf of a user receives and stores credentials using
standardized APIs any of those three or four that we talked about is aware
enough of

Dmitri Zagidulin: the ver credential data model to even minimally display a
credential even if it is just displaying the name of the credential or the
fact that it's a verifiable credential right like that that's sufficient
wallet is something that can service external requests from unknown issuers
which means it needs to involve issue registries and verifier registries.
It needs to be able to display who the party is who's asking for your
credentials. And if you're really advanced, it can service login sign with
encrypt with wallet kind of requests. So any questions about this proposal?
What else would you put in here? And so go ahead and raise your hand if you
want to hop on the queue.

Dmitri Zagidulin: All right, coyote. Go ahead.

Kayode Ezike: Yeah, this might be under the advanced to bucket as well
considering that there's I think only so many specs for something like
this, but export between different wallets.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah.

Kayode Ezike: Yeah, I know that there's some control manifest stuff going
on.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kayode Ezike: I know that you've also been thinking a little bit about the
different ways to go about that,…

Kayode Ezike: but that's seems like another one that is worth shooting.

Dmitri Zagidulin: 100% agreed.

Dmitri Zagidulin: It's critical for interoperability So we're absolutely
going to add approval or preferably encrypted, but yes, 100% agree with
you. let's see. I think Phil is next on the queue. Go ahead, Phil.

Phillip Long: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned in your comment
about some of the advanced functions and…

Phillip Long: in particular the idea of a to me ultimately does wherever I
am placing these credentials is it somewhere that I control or can someone
else turn it off without my permission. and I think what you're suggesting
with did login is at least in that context there may be an opportunity to
prevent a platform oversight of the storage that I am unable to have any
influence on as a holder or an individual. Thanks.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Thanks, Phil. I think you're up next.

Ildiko Mazar: Yes, I don't know…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Go ahead.

Ildiko Mazar: if it's implied by the already existing points but
verification would be something that could be quite important for at least
some credential types and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Great so okay, so I didn't include verification here, but
let's talk about it.

Ildiko Mazar:

Ildiko Mazar: I guess I cheated. I looked at slide 14 as well and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Do I have …

Ildiko Mazar: I'll have the credential portfolio here…

Dmitri Zagidulin: yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

Ildiko Mazar: which makes me think of the self claims and the self-signed
credentials which might have different credibility than third party issued
credentials. Again, depending on what kind of credential we're talking
about,…

Ildiko Mazar: driving licenses, formal or informal learning credentials,
etc.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, great question.

Dmitri Zagidulin: We're doing good on time. Let's talk about verifier
functionality. Should wallets also serve as verifiers? and I could see it
both ways. So, one, I would love for all wallets to have a verify button
and you scan something or you follow a link or you copy and paste and it
serves as your own trusted verifier. we've got standalone verifiers, but I
think a lot of us build in verify functionality for the wallet as a user
courtesy.
00:40:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: mostly we put it in there so that users themselves are
aware that hey if I hand this credential over to a requester to relying
party it's not going to verify over there so for the most part we do it for
user convenience and user courtesy but I think that's a really good point
that it might be really good functionality let's see.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Eric, go ahead. You're next on the queue.

Eric Shepherd: Thank you,…

Eric Shepherd: Demetri. I really appreciate all the thinking that you've
put into this. And as you were going through the various standards, I was
reminded of my work on email standards in the 80s and so I did a quick look
up of all the email standards that are now in play for effective email. So
all the verification that goes on of the senders and the receivers and what
you can do and then I was thinking now I understand why wallet might not be
the best term.

Eric Shepherd: for the person on the Clappam omnibus, I think it might
still work very effectively. But if we think about the functionality of
Gmail or Outlook, we have an inbox where stuff is coming to us. We can
decide maybe to verify it or to forward it or to share it. And we have kind
of an outbox that will say, " for this employer or this college admissions
program, I will share this stuff and I will not share." And so we want to
see what we've been sending out. And so maybe the parallels for wallets
have come about because issuers have been thinking about their own wallets.
But when this goes exponential, we're going to have too many wallets. so
there's got to be a consolidation of wallets because not every issuer can
have a wallet.

Eric Shepherd: So now we're looking at something that has more like the
functionality of an email client to accept and share and store and manage
effectively.

Dmitri Zagidulin: I think that's a really great point.

Dmitri Zagidulin: That's rucial. that what we're going for is general
purpose standardized functionality more like an email client, There's
nothing like we've been passing messages on computers as long as there have
been computers.

Dmitri Zagidulin: The innovation of email has been standardizing and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: making it general and interoperable. And that's what we
hope to do with the wallets as well. I really like that. you let me sure
make sure I capture that.

Eric Shepherd: And just for fun,…

Eric Shepherd: I put a list of all the email standards in the chat just so
that you'd understand. There's a lot of stuff going on with email that we
just take for granted.

James Chartrand: I was actually going to say something very similar to Eric
in that I imagine that at some point there is going to be this underlying
kind of utility that manages credentials.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Exactly.

James Chartrand: But I was thinking of it more analogous to a password
manager, So on your phone, you might have a password manager and it manages
the passwords for everything. and it's called upon, at different moments in
time to present the right password for whatever the application is that
you're using. And you could imagine credentials working the same way.
there's some underlying utility that lives on your phone and it stores all
of your verifiable credentials. and it's queried by something like the
verifiable credentials API that you mentioned, Demetri, that Google, Apple,
and Microsoft are working on. And I guess what I'm getting at is that
there's a split between some of the things that we think are always in a
wallet.

James Chartrand: there's this sense of managing the credentials but then we
also layer on this idea of what we're doing with the in the sense of
educational credentials managing them in a portfolio creating some set of
credentials that we're going to submit as part of a job application or what
have you. And we think of that as being part of the wallet as well. But
really it's a layer over top I think of this fundamental credentials
manager that sits underneath everything and that is like you said with IP
addresses Dimmitri hidden away. Nobody ever knows about the credentials
manager under or the keychain that you mentioned that we never go look at…
00:45:00

James Chartrand: but it's there and it handles all of these requests. And
so the same thing could be true of a credentials manager. It's just
something in the lying operating system almost that lives there and handles
these things for you and you never really have to go and look at it.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, that's a really good point.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Also echoes what Eric said about just like we've got the
protocol stacks.

James Chartrand: Yeah. Yes.

Dmitri Zagidulin: That's a really good lens to look at it with layers.
Let's see somebody else on the queue. Phil's talking about peer
endorsements.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, it's endorsements and selfish credentials are huge
and fascinating topic and I think one of the next upcoming VCU calls we're
going to dive deeper into that topic as well. we now have some experience
with it from the field. so it'll make for a great discussion. So as a bonus
I mentioned one do we need another name other than wallet and if we do what
would it be right things that come to mind portfolio credential agent other
stuff that I probably have not thought of that I would love to hear from

James Chartrand: It could just be credentials. It could just be, you have
an app on your phone and it's called credentials or…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Just okay.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. which…

James Chartrand: Credentials manager, I think, is a good one. I think it,
gets at what the app is doing more so than a wallet.

Dmitri Zagidulin: which is funny because just earlier in the call I think a
lot of us have pointed out that in a lot of ways credentials is more
confusing than wallet right so it's an interesting tension

James Chartrand: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. True. Yeah.

Alex Higuera: credentials is more confusing if you use it in conjunction
with a wallet because people have a wallet hold things that can be used and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Makes sense.

Alex Higuera: exchanged and if credentials are supposed to be what a wallet
holds then I think that would add a lot of confusion to the general public.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Makes sense.

Phillip Long: is the implicit thing there that the credential is a piece of
paper…

Phillip Long: but not really anything dynamic. Is that kind of the notion
that you're getting at, Alex?

Alex Higuera: No, not necessarily because these days, I mean, people have
wallets for crypto that can be used to, buy things in exchange. but I think
that the issue are credentials meant to be used in a constructive way?

Phillip Long: Thanks.

Alex Higuera: And if so, maybe a wallet does make sense. And if we're going
to use them more like a password manager that people never see, then we
shouldn't be using the term wallet.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So, I'm glad you mentioned those two things,…

Dmitri Zagidulin: us passive credentials and to put in, password managers
and Google Wallet and Apple Wallet in here. Just ran out of time. but since
we're discussing them the password manager comes up a lot for example when
I'm explaining wallets especially to developers they often say is it like a
credential man sorry is it like a password manager or people ask do
password managers provide this functionality since they already keep
secrets for you right they keep your password and what is a cryptographic
key other than just a long random looking password and the answer is yes
they absolutely should provide that functionality they don't

Dmitri Zagidulin: It's not yet on their radar. I would love to have
somebody like KeyPass Bit Warden or LastPass or whatever get into the
credential wallet game. They don't yet. Similarly, and this kind of goes
back to what we were saying, a lot of people immediately think of Apple
Wallet and Google Wallet. One of the reasons even though recently I think
it was Apple wallet put out a press release that they can store W3C
verifiable credentials.

Dmitri Zagidulin: one of according to our proposed functional definition
the reason that Apple and Google wallet don't quite apply yet just at this
moment but very soon is they store them passively. They don't have the
ability to present or sign on behalf of a user. they don't serve as
external requests from other unknown parties. but I know that both Apple
and…
00:50:00

Alex Higuera: What the freak?

Dmitri Zagidulin: Google are what are involved in the W3C Fed ID working
group on the digital identity API which means in addition to building into
their browsers into Safari and Chrome they're going to be building
responding to that credential API into their respective wallets.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So very soon, if not even immediately, they're going to
be active instead of passive, which is I like that terminology that in
chat, Philo says 100% in favor of supporting beer endorsements. And Phil
mentions external request manager is the person who holds their Apple
wallet with their TSA ID for the DSA agent to read.

Phillip Long: I'm being cheat.

Dmitri Zagidulin: So it's the standardized credential API. Yeah. Yep. I'm
with you there.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Are there any other core wallet functionality that's
missing from this list you can help me think of.

Eric Shepherd: Wouldn't there be the ability to share and…

Phillip Long: Give me too much.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. Yeah. Good call. receive store and…

Eric Shepherd: share with our application?

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, good good point.

James Chartrand: And I would say even as far as sharing goes in an
educational context,…

James Chartrand: you probably want your credentials manager or your wallet
to allow you to assemble, a portfolio kind of thing.

Eric Shepherd: Yeah. Yeah.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Good point.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Go ahead.

Ildiko Mazar: along the same lines to curate your al because the more
credentials we have the more we would like to store them in subfolders or
the I don't know tag them so that they are more easily identifiable and
usable but that's an advanced feature if we go very very Right.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. curation as
a possible core feature. I like that. Anything else? All right.

Dmitri Zagidulin: thank you so much for an excellent discussion. sounds
like we should definitely coming back to the future topics for VC edge
calls. So we'll definitely do a call on selfissue credentials and evidence
and endorsement. how should wlets handle them? What are some ways to
strengthen value of those? We should probably at some point soon do a
current state-of-the-art in credential APIs, right?

Dmitri Zagidulin: We should go over the W W W W W W W WC credential API,
the Open ID issuance and presentation API, the digital identity API built
into the browser, possibly TDCOM just to put them all together this is what
a request for a credential looks like in each of these protocols. These are
things in common. these are the core differences. So I think that might be
a really useful topic and I would love to demo the login with sign with
wallet functionality as well which should be coming up for at least learn a
credential wallet if not others.

Dmitri Zagidulin: All Any other last minute questions before we Put a
reminder in chat. work item update call is that during the regular CCG call
at noon or whatever? All so at least one of us VCI co-chair should be there
to just say a word. Phil in chat says QA protocols, right? Interesting.
00:55:00

Phillip Long: We'll do of course.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, these ILO and Phil you both make really good
points. be sure to bring them also to our upcoming discussion on self-issue
credentials versus institutionally issued. All right, thank you everyone.
really appreciate your excellent discussion and keep thinking about names
because names are hard and whether we want to replace the word wallet or
not. Cheers all.

Ildiko Mazar: Have a nice day.

Eric Shepherd: Thank you.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Bye all.
Meeting ended after 00:58:45 👋

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