DIF Newsletter #64
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August 2026
DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive
Table of contents
Decentralized Identity Foundation News
It's been a hot summer at DIF, with both Grace and Juan attending DWeb Camp and IETF. If you missed the July newsletter, while Grace was out, Operations Manager Grace-zel spilled the tea about what it's really like working at DIF.
- While DWeb Camp was mostly just for fun (and not on the DIF expense budget), IETF yielded positive results in terms of the potential to present DIDComm at IETF in November. Read up on that in the DIDComm Working Group Section.
- Significant progress has been made on the DIF instance of the Universal Resolver, with GoPlausible.com donating an edge-worker form-factor of the resolver called Thisdid.com that runs very price- and compute-efficiently on modern clouds for most known DID methods. Take a look at the Identifiers and Discovery WG section for all the details. Thanks so much for the hard work of MG, who put together a fantastic solution that allows any DIF member to add their resolver to the load-balance.
- We've got a third DIF-Recommended DID Method, and it's an heir to the DIF-incubated Sidetree methods! Check out the DID Methods Working Group section for that update and the other methods coming down the pike.
- Check out the mention of the KYA-OS approval in Business Wire!
- Members and friends of DIF, we are upgrading all of our records and moving to a formal Zoho CRM system. The Newsletter is still being sent out the same way, but you may notice a few changes. For example, if you are going to GDC, you'll get messages related to that. There will also be notifications about the annual Steering Committee elections. We won't be sending out bunches of mail or anything like that, but you might notice some format changes.
By the way, if you haven't been following our blog regularly, note that we've got content almost every week, and our YouTube channel has been stacking up the Hot Takes videocasts! This month on the blog we've had updates and news on did:webvh, fundamental axioms for identity design, and our DIDcomm survey results
Speaking of spicy takes, our Executive Director Grace Rachmany was featured on the Accidental Gods Podcast, explaining how Identity is at the core of scaling social and ecological movements. No technical talk, just an in-depth discussion of the application of self-sovereign identity might support emergent self-organizing patterns.
Working Group Updates
DIF Members are welcome to join and participate in any working group. Most working groups meet on a weekly basis, and the most active groups have task force meetings that focus on specific work items. All public meetings are recorded and you can find all of the information on our working groups here.
Creator Assertions Working Group
- Approval of CAWG Specifications version 1.3. This version differs from version 1.2 primarily in the removal of
expected_countersignersand similar fields and in changes in how CAWG X.509 validation is reflected in status codes. There are no known implementations ofexpected_countersignersor related fields. - CAWG was invited, through DIF, to submit guest posts to the KuppingerCole blog. Look out for two fantastic posts by Matthew Rappard of Cognitive Proof, who stepped up to take advantage of this opportunity.
- The Trust Task Force is finalizing the parameters needed for the Trust Registry action in the CAWG Identity Assertion. We agreed to move forward with the four standard parameters specified in the Trust Over IP’s Trust Registry Query Protocol (TRQP) (
entity_id,action,resource, andauthority_id). The Task Force making progress on adding governance hooks or additional claims hooks within the identity assertion, one being the trust registry hook based on Trust Over IP’s Trust Registry Query Protocol and establishing a long-term plan for governing identity credential issuance. - The Trust Task force walked walked through a reference architecture of a CAWG/TRQP test scenario (Photography contest) with Sankharshan Mukhopadhyay.
- Definitions Task Force, led by Erik Passoja, was formed to create CAWG-based taxonomy to standardize the terminology for CAWG. Meetings are 9 am Pacific time on Thursdays. Based on recent discussion, have split the definition of "creator" into two terms: "content creator" and "asset creator."
- CAWG UI Task force, led by Matthew Rappard is now meeting regularly Tuesdays at 8 am Pacific time
- The CAWG co-chairs presented their work at the 18Aug meeting of the W3C Verifiable Credentials group to discuss collaboration on use of W3C compliant credentials with CAWG.
- CAWG mention! At Identiverse, the Identity at the Center Podcast interviewed Mike Kiser, who spoke about C2PA and CAWG at a basic level. If you’ll be at any of the upcoming events where they’re recording, let the DIF ED know, and she’ll put you in touch with them for an interview.
- Alex Bainbridge was featured discussing HATPro and DIF on a since-released 20-minute segment on the ITB Berlin podcast.
Trusted AI Agents Working Group
The two main workstreams of the WG are making incremental but steady process on their respective goals.
The KYA-OS group is still moving over infrastructure to a DIF homebase (the pipeline for updating the permanent-URLs of JSON Schemas, for example), and long-term design work on modularity and extensions towards a V1.2 release later this year are ongoing, mostly visible as issue-threads on the kya-os-mcp repo (thanks to two of our new members for thorough yakshaving!). See, for instance, the on-chain revocation-status demo that Vouched prepared for DEFCON showcasing did:cheqd’s per-actor resource resolution. DIF Member Cheqd helped to integrate this into the framework only last month).
With the release of the recent MCP major release milestone, the task force has turned its attention to responding. One clear victory was that the release required no major changes to KYA-OS for compatibility, signalling that the protocol is on the right track. the MCP release formalized the SEP process and registry extensions. Vouched is leading the efforts to participate in the formal process to increase of visibility and grow the KYA-OS community.
Speaking of the KYA-OS community, projects extending or building on KYA-OS keep announcing themselves, so the task force is discussing a “Builders’ Registry” to credit users (regardless of upstream changes and thus DIF membership). If you are building on KYA-OS and want to showcase your awesome work, open an issue and you can be included when a registry goes live.
The Delegated Authority task force has shifted gears from rough drafts to first drafts, refining and fact-checking and caveating each other’s “evaluation” chapters that apply the “scorecard” derived from the earlier problem space report. Working drafts are only visible to DIF members via the DIF Slack, but an editor’s draft of these evaluations should hit Github before the next newsletter as the first drafts are edited together into a cohesive whole. (We’re still welcoming volunteers to contribute additional sections on how VCs are used for permissions in other communities, how ZTAuth composes or contrasts with other authorization protocols in cross-org/open-world usecases, etc!).
One of the capability-certificate languages under review is the long-standing W3C Credentials CG work item, “Authorization Capabilities", which the unfamiliar may only have heard of in the capabilityInvocation examples in the DID specification. W3C-CCG has spun up a task force to advance that specification, as well as related specifications like the Encrypted Data Vault (a dormant CCG-DIF joint item). DIF members relying on the EDV in their work or looking to understand how they could apply the EDV architecture to TAAWG use-cases are invited to attend as guests, but W3C-CCG membership is required to make substantial contributions to the interlocking specifications.
Lastly, NIST released an AI evaluation framework recently and there are a few weeks left in the Request for Comment period. TAAWG contributor Tom Jones already submitted one individually and shared a draft with us, but parties interested in coauthoring or cosigning a more detailed one from the WG collectively can inquire on DIF Slack.
Hospitality and Travel Working Group
The Hospitality and Travel Working Group continues work on the HATPro protocol, including putting together a translation strategy for HATPro, and discussing two main aspects: data property values and schema elements, with most content being lookup tables that can be translated using BCP 47 language standards. The discussion also covered edge translation approaches where language-neutral data is translated at the edge of the system (i.e. in-browser or in-app), allowing different parties to use their preferred languages without needing to know each other's language preferences.
The group has been moving from the food allergies categories to expand the taxonomies around activities, experiences and lifestyle preferences. Alex Bainbridge was featured discussing HATPro and DIF on a since-released 20-minute segment on the ITB Berlin podcast, which is a major international trade show.
DIDComm Working Group
The DIDcomm working group has been busy with two major topics of discussion: DIDcomm’s strategic vision, as documented by Makki Elfatih, and the potential for bringing some version of DIDcomm into scope for an IETF working group. Both task forces made major progress, with a well thought-through framework for considering DIDcomm’s strategic direction, and a comprehensive report from DIF’s Executive Director (Grace) and Technical Lead (Bumblefudge) from the IETF, as well as results from the DIDcomm survey. New member Tech5 has joined DIF, contributing information from their deployment to millions of people for national and regional networks, using DIDcomm as the messaging infrastructure.
DIDcomm WG is actively discussing what it would take to create an appropriate technical document to the IETF, and more generally how a potential MLS subprotocol (and/or post-quantum cryptography) should be prioritized in the planning for a version 3 of DIDComm. The main concern is the resources that would be needed to participate in the working group, including supporting other people’s proposals, the write-up of an appropriate DIDcomm proposal to the IETF as an add-on to MLS, and participation long-term in the IETF until the proposal is passed. Any DIF members who are interested in getting involved in this work, or in attending the live (online or in person) IETF to support the work, please get in touch with the DIDcomm working group or the ED.
DID Methods Working Group
The Recommended DID Methods track is churning out recommendations! After the initial announcement a month ago, several more methods are in the pipeliine and DIF is delighted to announce:
did:cidis now officially a DIF recommended DID Method! Congrats for being the first [multi-]blockchain-based method to make it over the line.did:ethris not far behind! The WG is just waiting for Mircea's availability to join a meeting for finalization/ratification.did:hederais in the pipeline nextdid:soulpresented on July 15, and is now open to comments.
Kudos to the DID Methods Working Group for the tremendous amount of time and effort it takes to review these methods and ensure they stand up to DIF's requirements for recommended methods.
Identifiers and Discovery Working Group
Regular meetings of I&D have been on extended “European summer” hiatus but work on the Universal Resolver has been chugging along, with one of the DIF community’s implementations of the Universal Resolver getting a major overhaul and donating the results to the DIF community.
Based on the Typescript/NPM-based universal resolver that previously was used as a sidecar for multi-DID implementations of Veramo, Thisdid.com adopts the “edge-worker” capabilities of hono and npm to make a more “on-demand”, just-in-time form factor, allowing some DID method operations (or entire resolutions in the case of some methods) to happen in a service worker, cheaper and faster than requiring a traditional always-on backend. These latter are still required for some DID methods (and many more DID methods have submitted dockerized drivers than NPM drivers over the years), so ThisDID.com proxies all requests for methods it does not support to known resolvers that do. Currently, it is proxying only to resolvers run by other DIF members, based on a simple algorithm ranking them by recent uptime/response-time metrics when multiple known resolvers support a given method. Look forward to an upcoming blog post explaining all of the updates and the official announcement.
Applied Crypto Working Group
The Applied Crypto Working Group continued incremental improvements in the following areas:
- Updates to the API specification for blind signatures
- Presentations to the CFRG group at IRTF
- Device binding functionality for BBS Crypto Suites
- Implementation of a new proof solution
DIDComm User Group
The DIDcomm user group continues to host a variety of demos of DIDcomm use. As a result of the DIDcomm Survey conducted by DIF and Leadpoint, there is now a backlog of more than a dozen projects looking forward to showing their work at the DIDcomm User Group. Watch the mailing lists and Slack for news on upcoming demos that the group will be hosting.
📢 Upcoming Events
GDC 2026
📅 September 1-3, 2026
📍 Geneva, Switzerland
Event information
- DIF is a co-organizer! Meet Grace Rachmany, Richard Epslin, Scott Perry, Agne Caunt, and a slew of other DIF friends on stage and off.
Identity Week America
📅 September 2-3, 2026
📍 Washington, DC
Event information
- CAWG member Will Kreth will present on behalf of CAWG
- KYA-OS members Vouched.id will demo their work
AGNTcon and MCPcon
📅 September 17-18, 2026
📍 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Event information
- Look out for DIF Tech Lead Juan Caballero at the conference
AIdentity & Non-Human Identity Impact Day 2026
📅 October 6, 2026
📍 Munich, Germany
Event information
- Grace Rachmany will be presenting the work of TAAWG in the talk "Who authorized that transaction?"
Internet Identity Workshop
📅 November 2-5, 2026
📍 Mountain View, California
Event Information
- Free side events: VRM Day and miniKERICONF will take place November 2
Agentic Internet Workshop
📅 November 6, 2026
📍 Mountain View, California
Event Information
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 127
📅 November 14-20, 2026
📍 San Francisco, California
Event Information
👉Are you a DIF member with news to share? Email us at communication@identity.foundation with details.
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