Press Release: W3C publishes Verifiable Credentials 2.0 as a W3C Standard, making expression, exchange, and verification of digital credentials easier and more secure

Dear friends of W3C,

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published Verifiable Credentials 2.0 as a W3C Standard, making expression, exchange, and verification of digital credentials easier and more secure. 

Credentials are a part of our daily lives; driver's licenses are used to assert that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to assert our level of education, government-issued passports enable us to travel between countries. The family of Verifiable Credentials W3C Recommendations provides a mechanism to express digital credentials in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and machine-verifiable, as well as provides an extension mechanism so that specific applications (identity credentials, university credentials, etc.) can use their own terminology.

“At a time when so many are wrestling with trusted digital information, Verifiable Credentials 2.0 reaching the status of Web Standards is a critical signal to innovators, policymakers, and tech leaders in governments, industry, and civil society to build the global digital trust upon interoperable, trustworthy, and privacy-aware open web standards,” declared Seth Dobbs, W3C CEO and President. “Whether the needs are for digital wallets in sectors like Health, Financial Services, Travel, and Education, or whether the needs are for government identities, organization identities, Smart Things identities — all key enablers for society — the VC family of standards is set to enable trusted and privacy-aware digital interactions.”

Learn more in our press release, copied in text below at online at:
https://www.w3.org/press-releases/2025/verifiable-credentials-2-0

If you are interested to schedule an interview, please contact us at <w3t-pr@w3.org>. 

Yours sincerely,

Amy van der Hiel
W3C Media Relations Coordinator

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W3C publishes Verifiable Credentials 2.0 as a W3C Standard, making expression, exchange, and verification of digital credentials easier and more secure 

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[https://www.w3.org/](/) – 15 May 2025 – Credentials are a part of our daily lives; driver's licenses are used to assert that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to assert our level of education, government-issued passports enable us to travel between countries. The family of Verifiable Credentials W3C Recommendations provides a mechanism to express digital credentials in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and machine-verifiable, as well as provides an extension mechanism so that specific applications (identity credentials, university credentials, etc.) can use their own terminology.

“_At a time when so many are wrestling with trusted digital information, Verifiable Credentials 2.0 reaching the status of Web Standards is a critical signal to innovators, policymakers, and tech leaders in governments, industry, and civil society to build the global digital trust upon interoperable, trustworthy, and privacy-aware open web standards,_” declared Seth Dobbs, W3C CEO and President. “_Whether the needs are for digital wallets in sectors like Health, Financial Services, Travel, and Education, or whether the needs are for government identities, organization identities, Smart Things identities — all key enablers for society — the VC family of standards is set to enable trusted and privacy-aware digital interactions._"

A verifiable credential is defined as a set of claims made by an issuer about a subject. The holder of the credential can then present it to a verifier, who can check that the claims genuinely come from the issuer and were not tampered with. Claims use properties from a standard vocabulary defined by the Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0 and expressed in JSON-LD, a lightweight syntax to serialize Linked Data in JSON, thus favoring a decentralized and permissionless approach to extensibility, provisioning for existing or new applications distributed on the web.

The authenticity and integrity of a verifiable credential come from using cryptography, especially through the use of digital signatures and related mathematical proofs to check the structural validity of contents so that all three parties — issuer, holder, verifier — have a consistent mechanism of trust in interpreting the data that they are providing or provided with.

To accommodate a wide variety of use-cases with different technical and regulatory requirements, the Verifiable Credentials family of specifications defines several techniques for attaching proofs to sets of claims. These different methods rely on existing specifications from IETF and W3C. Holders of verifiable credentials can also provide to verifiers a subset of a credential (providing selective disclosure of the private data) or combine several credentials into one. These so-called Verifiable Presentations are usually short-lived and not meant to be stored for a long period. The standards used for signing and encryption are based on cryptographic methods widely adopted and deployed in the ecosystem.

The general framework for verifications defines specific verification methods based on generally known and accepted cryptographic approaches, and new cryptographic methods (e.g., post-quantum) can be adopted if they come to the fore.

"_The VCWG has done a great job producing this latest set of W3C Recommendations,_” said Brent Zundel, co-chair of the Verifiable Credentials Working Group. “_It is exciting to see the work progress so far. More and more implementations are being used. Verifiable credentials are poised to make a significant impact on the way people and systems share data._"

About the World Wide Web Consortium
-----------------------------------

The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to lead the web to its full potential by creating technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the web remains open, accessible, and interoperable for everyone around the globe. W3C well-known standards HTML and CSS are the foundational technologies upon which websites are built. W3C works on ensuring that all foundational web technologies meet the needs of civil society, in areas such as accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy. W3C also provides the standards that undergird the infrastructure for modern businesses leveraging the web, in areas such as entertainment, communications, digital publishing, and financial services. That work is created in the open, provided for free and under the groundbreaking W3C Patent Policy.

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_End Press Release_

Media Contact
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Amy van der Hiel, W3C Media Relations Coordinator <[w3t-pr@w3.org](mailto:w3t-pr@w3.org)\>   
+1.617.453.8943 (US, Eastern Time)

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2025 13:14:53 UTC