Re: Restarting work on the zCap (Authorization Capabilities) work item

I am supportive of starting up the work on zCaps again. Very important work.

Monthly calls make sense - I will join if the time permits.

Thanks,
Will



On Thu, Apr 2, 2026 at 1:06 AM Dmitri Zagidulin <dzagidulin@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
> A few weeks ago on the CCG call discussing the various work items, I
> brought up the subject of zCaps (Authorization Capabilities), which is an
> existing (if somewhat dormant) CCG work item, at
> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/zcap-spec. And several people have expressed
> interest in working on that spec again.
>
> In parallel, the Delegated Authorization Task Force of the Trusted AI
> Agent WG at DIF has been evaluating various delegated authorization
> specifications (including zCaps, various OAuth-based specs, UCANs, GNAP,
> and many others), and has determined that there's not many authorization
> options out there with chained delegation ability (basically, zCaps
> (JSON-based) and UCANs (DAG-CBOR-based) are the only ones). This is
> especially relevant and timely due to all the momentum and activity behind
> agent-based development, and the lack of authorization and guardrails in
> that area.
>
> To that end, I'd like to restart work on the zCap spec here at the CCG.
> The current spec version is v0.3, but it's been out of sync with the way
> zcaps have been deployed to production by the TruAge project, Digital
> Bazaar, DCC, and others.
> So our first goal would be to just update the spec to v0.4, to match the
> existing implementations.
>
> It would be also great to start work on version v0.5, as several new use
> cases and feature requests have come up in the meantime.
>
> So, couple of questions of the group:
>
> 1. Would anyone like to help edit the spec?
>
> 2. Would folks be interested in a zCap task force call, either monthly or
> bi-weekly, to work on the spec?
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
>