Issuer
An issuer is 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.
An issuer hands a signed credential to a holder over a protocol such as OpenID4VCI, and never needs to be contacted again when that credential is later checked: a verifier validates the signature against the issuer’s public key instead. Under eIDAS 2.0, an issuer of qualified attestations must be listed on a national Trusted List, so any verifier can confirm it is authorised without a separate agreement per issuer.