Presentation Exchange

Presentation Exchange is the specification a relying party uses to describe, in a machine-readable way, exactly which credentials and claims it needs from a holder, so a wallet can automatically match the request against the credentials it holds.

A presentation definition lists the credential types and fields a relying party accepts as proof, for example "a credential proving the holder is over 18, issued by a Trusted List member". The wallet evaluates that definition against the credentials in the holder's wallet, shows the holder which ones match, and lets them approve exactly what gets shared. OpenID4VP has historically carried presentation exchange requests between a relying party and a wallet. The specification, published by the Decentralized Identity Foundation, supports constraints beyond a simple credential type match: a relying party can require a specific claim value, restrict which issuers it accepts, or ask for one credential from a set of acceptable alternatives, and can mark some requested items as optional rather than mandatory. This lets a single request cover several acceptable ways of proving the same fact, for example either a driving licence or a national ID card for an age check, instead of forcing the relying party to issue separate requests per credential type. The OpenID4VP working group has more recently moved toward the newer, more compact Digital Credentials Query Language (DCQL) for expressing the same kind of request, with Presentation Exchange remaining in use for backward compatibility in existing deployments. Either way, the underlying idea stays the same: the relying party states its requirements once, in a format wallets can parse without human intervention, so the holder is asked to approve a concrete match rather than to interpret free-text instructions about what to hand over.

• identity.foundation

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