Credential Offer
A Credential Offer is the message an issuer sends to a wallet to start issuance under OpenID4VCI: it names the issuer, says which credentials are on offer, and tells the wallet how it is allowed to collect them.
In practice the offer is what sits behind the QR code on an issuance page or the link in an email. Scanning it hands the wallet the issuer’s URL and one or more credential configuration identifiers, plus a grant that decides the rest of the flow: an authorization code grant sends the holder through the issuer’s own login first, while a pre-authorized code grant is used when the holder was already authenticated where the offer was created, optionally protected by a transaction code shown on the other channel. From there the wallet reads the issuer metadata, exchanges the grant for an access token and calls the credential endpoint to collect what was offered.