Introduction

Traditional credentials are susceptible to forgery and tampering, with manual verification processes that are time-consuming and prone to errors. In today’s digital age, the need for interoperable, secure, and easily verifiable credentials is as critical as ever.

Verifiable Credentials, an open standard set by W3C, offer a secure and standardized way to represent digital credentials. However, integrating Verifiable Credentials into your application is very challenging, since you must:

• Ensure cryptographically secure issuance
• Establish a reliable method for storing and distributing credentials to users
• Maintain a revocation server
• Provide instructions or SDKs for parties wishing to verify these credentials
• Repeat this entire process to ensure compatibility if you wish to enable onchain functionality within smart contracts

Crossmint’s Verifiable Credentials API simplifies this entire process for you, by leveraging blockchain technology to provide a reliable and secure solution for issuing, managing, and verifying digital credentials.

Our implementation is 100% standard-compliant and interoperable, working both off and onchain. This makes credentials issued by Crossmint ideal for traditional use cases, such as academic degrees and identity documents, as well as digital native use cases, such as credentialing AI agents or serving as conditions in smart contracts.

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Key Characteristics

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How Does it Work?

Crossmint’s Verifiable Credentials support all stages of a credential’s lifecycle:

1. Issuance: Define the credential type, and then issue credentials to users, by specifying their email or wallet address.

2. Storage: Securely store all credentials with Crossmint, on your end, or in a decentralized permanent storage network (IPFS). Your data is end-to-end encrypted and private.

3. Presentation: Easily retrieve subject credentials filtering only to the ones you are interested in. You can retrieve credentials from Crossmint wallets or any other wallet of your choice.

4. Verification: Cryptographically validate that a credential you have been presented is valid. Use it to authorize users against your system, without ever having to interface with the issuer.

5. Revocation: Immediately revoke credentials, without subject intermediation.

Note: Typically, issuance, storage, and revocation are performed by the issuing party, while presentation and verification by a third-party verifier.

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Why issue Verifiable Credentials onchain?

When an entity issues a Verifiable Credential with Crossmint, it signs a tamper-proof credential containing the subject’s private data and links it to the subject by issuing a related NFT, which is then sent to the subject’s wallet/email. The credential’s private data payload can be encrypted and stored at the issuer’s storage location of choice. This way the subject’s personal data remains private.

At the same time, the Verifiable Credential’s association with an NFT onchain makes the certificate declaration public, immutable, and interoperable. This enables any third-party verifier to make a request for the credential’s authenticity, enabling composable use cases across applications. Finally, this publicly verifiable declaration protects the recipient from any unexpected credential revocation by the issuer, since this action would be transparently visible.

This combination of privacy, blockchain composability, and Crossmint’s reliable and scalable NFT infrastructure, supports customers’ needs for any use case in credential issuance and verification, at scale.

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