First Public Working Draft: Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers

Author(s) and publish date

The Decentralized Identifier Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers. This document sets out use cases and requirements for a new type of identifier that has 4 essential characteristics:

decentralized: there should be no central issuing agency;
persistent: the identifier should be inherently persistent, not requiring the continued operation of an underling organization;
cryptographically verifiable: it should be possible to prove control of the identifier cryptographically;
resolvable: it should be possible to discover metadata about the identifier.

Although existing identifiers may display some of these characteristics, none currently displays all four.