Digital credential glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms Credenco uses across its products and content, from credential formats and protocols to the roles that issue, hold, and verify them.
- Verifiable Credential
- A tamper-evident digital claim about a person or organisation that can be cryptographically verified without contacting the party that issued it. Verifiable credentials replace paper documents and PDFs with data that a verifier can trust on its own.
- W3C VC
- The World Wide Web Consortium's open data model for verifiable credentials. It defines how claims, issuers, and cryptographic proofs are structured so credentials remain interoperable across different wallets and platforms.
- SD-JWT
- Selective Disclosure JSON Web Token: a credential format that lets a holder reveal only some of the claims inside a signed token while keeping the rest hidden, without invalidating the issuer's signature.
- Selective Disclosure
- The ability to share only the specific attributes a verifier needs from a credential, for example proving you are over 18 without revealing your exact birth date. It is a core privacy property of modern credential formats such as SD-JWT.
- OpenID4VCI
- OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance: the protocol a wallet uses to request and receive a credential from an issuer over a standard OAuth2-based flow.
- OpenID4VP
- OpenID for Verifiable Presentations: the protocol a wallet uses to present one or more credentials to a verifier in response to a request, so the verifier can check them without a separate integration per issuer.
- DID
- Decentralized Identifier: a globally unique identifier that does not depend on a central registry. DIDs let issuers, holders, and verifiers reference each other and resolve public keys without a central authority.
- EUDI Wallet
- The European Digital Identity Wallet mandated by eIDAS 2.0: a wallet app every EU member state must offer citizens and businesses for storing and presenting verifiable credentials, recognised across all 27 member states.
- eIDAS 2.0
- The revised European regulation on electronic identification and trust services. It mandates the EUDI Wallet and establishes the legal framework for verifiable credentials to carry legal validity across the European Union.
- Issuer
- The organisation that creates and cryptographically signs a verifiable credential (for example a government agency, a bank, or a chamber of commerce), vouching for the claims it contains.
- Holder
- The person or organisation that receives a verifiable credential, stores it in a wallet, and decides when and with whom to share it. The holder is not necessarily the subject the credential is about.
- Verifier
- The party that checks a presented credential: validating the issuer's signature, confirming the credential has not been revoked, and reading only the claims the holder chose to disclose.
- Revocation
- The mechanism an issuer uses to invalidate a credential after it was issued (for example when a qualification expires or a registration is withdrawn), so verifiers checking it afterwards see it as no longer valid.
- Trust Framework
- The set of technical standards, legal rules, and governance agreements that let issuers, holders, and verifiers rely on each other's credentials across organisations and borders, such as the framework eIDAS 2.0 establishes for the EU.
- KYC
- Know Your Customer: the checks an organisation performs to verify a customer's identity. Verifiable credentials let a customer reuse an identity check already performed elsewhere instead of repeating it for every new relationship.
- KYB
- Know Your Business: the checks an organisation performs to verify a business counterparty, such as its registration, UBOs, and authorised representatives. Business credentials let these facts be proven instantly instead of via manual document checks.