W3C Verifiable Credentials

Scored both ways, the alternative first. These pages are read by the vendors they name, and a comparison that loses no rows is read as marketing.

Where it wins

A genuine standard for portable signed claims with a mature ecosystem, selective disclosure, and no dependence on the issuer being reachable at verification time. The data model is more general than ours.

Where it cannot go

Generality is the cost. There is no agreed delegation-chain profile, no attenuation semantics, and no shared scope vocabulary, so two implementations that both conform still cannot verify each other’s agents.

↑ delegated authority→ the spec, v0.3↓ the verifier