February 2026
DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive
Table of contents
- Decentralized Identity Foundation News; 2. Working Group Updates; 3 Special Interest Group Updates; 4 User Group Updates; 5. Announcements; 6. Community Events; 7. DIF Member Spotlights; 8. Get involved! Join DIF
🚀 Decentralized Identity Foundation News
2026 kicked off with lots of DIF action:
- Welcome to new Associate Member Kyndryl! Kyndryl is joining with an eye on the Trusted AI Agents Working Group. Check out the blog post welcoming them to DIF.
- Welcome to our new Operations Manager, Gracezel Luis! Gracezel is an experienced project manager, content marketing professional, and operations expert. The addition of Gracezel will allow DIF to continue to focus on Operational Excellence in 2026. She will be handling all membership and working group administration. Look out for a blog post next month where Grace and Gracezel interview one another in an AMA format!
“I’m glad to be joining DIF at this stage of its growth. I’ve spent the last decade working across operations, project management, and cross-functional teams, with a strong focus on clarity and follow-through. In this role, I’ll be supporting the Executive Director, Steering Committee, membership, and working groups—particularly across membership and working group administration by strengthening processes and helping ensure initiatives move forward in a steady and well-coordinated way.”
- DIF Hot Takes launch February 17, 9 am UTC : Join Bumblefudge as he gives you the lowdown on MOSIP Connect. See the DIF calendar or join here.
- The Steering Committee approved two CAWG specifications: User experience guidance 1.0 and the Organizational identity profile 1.0
- Trusted AI Agents WG created a Delegated Authority Task Force, started formalizing the use cases discussed so far as a common resource across Task Forces, discussed and experimented with Threat Modeling as a cross-Task Force exercise, began a Report on Delegated Authority, and started transitioning Vouched ID's MCP-I protocol to DIF governance within the WG.
- CAWG announces two new Task Forces to explore concrete integration of attestation platforms: one specific to ACDC envelopes, and another for more generic VC/VP tooling.
- DIF will be on the screening committee for the programming at TDI. Submit a proposal to the Call for Talks before the 22nd if you'd like to participate.
We can't believe we're only 6 weeks into the year and so much has already happened. More to follow in soon-to-be-released blog posts, so stay turned!
🛠️ Working Group Updates
Browse our working groups here
Creator Assertions Working Group
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This month's highlight was the approval by the Steering Committee of the two specifications: User experience guidance 1.0 and the Organizational identity profile 1.0.
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CAWG announced two new Work Items: an ACDC Task Force and a more general VC/VP Task Force. Times for these meetings are being scheduled.
The Creator Assertions Working Group had several guests this month, presenting collaborative projects, with two presentations about the Ayra registry, one with Drummond Reed and another with Darryl O'Donnell. The Ayra provides registry services to groups that don't necessarily fall into the "legal entity" status.
During their regular working meetings, CAWG focused on reviewing and discussing several PRs related to the metadata and identity assertion specifications. The group addressed concerns about handling multiple participants in the same role and agreed to research and clarify the language for this scenario. They also discussed a new status code for network traffic validation and debated the naming of sections in the verifiable credentials specification. The conversation ended with a discussion about the need for user education materials and tools to validate compliance with the CAWG specification.
Trusted AI Agents Working Group
The TAAWG has moved to weekly half-hour meetings for the main WG and weekly meetings for the Delegated Authority Task Force.
- Pull Request 30 was reviewed, finalizing documentation for the first 4 use cases for the TAAWG working group. The PR is still open for comments.
- TAAWG launched the Delegated Authorization Task Force, which will be working on an overview of existing work in the area of delegated authorization, data models, and protocols, and then performing a gap analysis to determine where TAAWG can contribute to this rapidly-evolving area.
- Tom Jones shared a Threat Modeling Report which was reviewed by the working group. The proposed use case being threat modeled conceptualizes an Agentic and policy-enforcing local AI model, tasked with maximmizing privacy and security vis-a-vis remote agents and services. Commments are welcome, specifically on the first 2 pages (the rest should be considered as an appendix).
- The Delegated Authority Task Force has made progress on a Delegation Report for submission through the working group.
- Alex Keisner, owner of the Know-Your-Agent product at Vouched, introduced MCP-I as a proposed identity extension to the popular MCP server/client protocol, addressing the need for a standard identity handshake between agents and MCP servers guarding resources. MCP-I may become a separate work item/task force and those interested will be choosing a regular meeting time to discuss DIF governance of the extension.
Hospitality and Travel Working Group
The technical H&TWG have continued their work on Schemas for various common industry-wide use cases, focusing on food taxonomy and preferences, quote systems, and edge computing use cases. The WG and User Group (non-IP-protected) are continuing to find IP-safe ways to share ideas, and encourage members of the latter to join DIF if they want to participate in technical design and implementations.
DID Methods Working Group
- DMWG has been working on making a number of the DID methods viable for becoming DIF-recommended methods. In addition to discussing what it means to become a DIF-recommended method, the group has been selecting different methods and working on incrementally improving the methods to submit as candidates for recommendation. Anyone who has a particular DID method that they want to work on bringing to candidate-quality level should fill out the proposal and schedule with the WG chairs to go through the requirements.
- The did:webplus method was updated to reflect support for additional hash methods (SHA-256, CHAR256/CHAR512) and has completed the 60 day review period, and the chairs are completing the work to make it a formal recommendation and submit the PR.
- The second deep dive on DIDwebs, signifying the start of the 60-day review period, was last Wednesday. Since the first deep dive, the did:webs team had an update on the pull request to register the ConditionalProof2022 signature suite for JSON-LD verification purposes. More info can be found on Pull Request for v9.017
- did:webs prevents BOLA attacks with pre-rotation keys, provides multisig issuance of the initial identifier, and multi-threshold proofs. The full presentation can be found here
- The formal proposal at W3C to propose a W3C WG complementary to DIF's is stalled because no W3C member organization has stepped up to champion and chair the working group.
Identifiers and Discovery Working Group
- The BCVH instance of the Traction Sandbox is now live. The sandbox can be used to test DID:WebVH implementation Initial workshop for using the Traction Sandbox
- Approval for adding an optional Heartbeat parameter which would deactivate DIDs which have no updates for the amount of time defined in the Heartbeat parameter.
- IDWG is seeking feedback on the witness proof system and DidWebVH, particularly regarding file storage and size optimization. More info here.
- The group discussed making domain names optional for DIDs.This would moves did:webvh to align with did:scid
- The group is moving forward with a number of PRs and updates
🪪 Claims & Credentials Working Group
- Exploratory work on DIF "active contributor" credentialing is underway, in discussions with the First Person Project and others. Reach out to chair Otto Mora on DIF Slack if interested.
- Further work on the Credential Schemas is on hold, but evaluators/users of the credentials collected to date or proposers of additional credentials are encouraged to open an issue or reach out on DIF Slack.
Applied Crypto Working Group
The ACWG continues discussion on BBS and ZKPs and collaboration with IETF's CFRG. They are proceeding to resolve the GitHub issues regarding BBS generator standardization and provide comments, especially addressing concerns from the Privacy Pass team and other cryptographers.
DIDComm User Working Group
Pull requests under discussion
The DIDcomm Users Group saw demos of two main protocol developments presented by Vinay: a chess game protocol with move verification through cryptographic hashing, and a mesh networking protocol for offline communication using Bluetooth and potentially LoRa technology. Vinay demonstrated a mobile app featuring various cryptographic and verification capabilities, including peer-to-peer calls, credential issuance, and document signing, with plans to present some features to the Open Wallet Foundation. He will be proceeding to develop an FFI (Foreign Function Interface) for Cradle/CredOTS to allow interoperability with the Rust mesh protocol implementation.
🌎 DIF Special Interest Group Updates
Browse our special interest groups here
DIF Hospitality & Travel SIG
The team advanced work on a standardized travel profile schema, focusing on multilingual support and international data handling requirements. A major highlight was the January 30th session featuring presentations from SITA and Indicio, who demonstrated successful implementation of verifiable credentials in travel, including a pilot program in Aruba.
Key developments included:
- Progress on JSON schema development for standardized travel profiles
- Advancement of multilingual and localization capabilities
- Refinement of terminology and glossary for industry standardization
- Demo of successful verifiable credentials implementation in live travel environment
DIF China SIG
The China SIG is growing to a vibrant community, with over 140 people in the discussion group. In 2024 they organized 9 online meetings and invited different DID experts for discussions, including experts from GLEIF, DIF, and TrustOverIP.
APAC/ASEAN Discussion Group
The APAC / ASEAN group discussed membership and how to increase participation in the region.
DIF Africa SIG
This month the DID Unconference is being hosted in South Africa with DIF as a sponsor.
📖 DIF User Group Updates
DIDComm User Group
The DIDComm User Group established additional meeting times to accommodate global participation. They worked on expanding their reach and planned engagement with Trust Spanning Protocol representatives, while also focusing on improving documentation and accessibility.
If you are interested in participating in any of the Working Groups highlighted above, or any of DIF's other Working Groups, please click join DIF.
📢 Upcoming Events
Will you be attending any upcoming Identity events? Let us know so other DIF members can find you!
DID Unconference Africa 24-26 February, 2026 (South Africa)
DID:UNCONF AFRICA brings together local and international innovators, leaders, and activists to reshape the future of digital identity. This event fosters innovation, collaboration, and interoperability, making a significant impact on the inclusive development of digital identity in Africa. For the second year running, DIF will be sponsoring the event. Expect to see Steering Committee Member and CAWG Co-chair Eric Scouten in attendance. Eric and Africa SIG Chair Gideon Lobard will be giving us their Hot Takes in March. Watch the February newsletter and DIF calendar for exact time and date.
ITB Berlin, 3-5 March, 2026 (Berlin)
DIF Member Alex Bainbridge (Autoura) will be speaking about identity at the world's largest travel conference.
IETF 125 Shenzhen, 14-20 March, 2026 (Shenzhen)
Our new Executive Director, Grace Rachmany, will be attending IETF125 this year in APAC.
4th International Workshop on Trends in Digital Identity (TDI)
📅 April 20-21, 2026
📍 Verona, Italy
Learn more
Internet Identity Workshop IIWXLII #42
📅 April 28–30, 2026
📍 Mountain View, CA
Registration and details
Agentic Internet Workshop #2
📅 May 1, 2026
📍 Mountain View, CA
Learn more
Identiverse 2026
📅 June 15–18, 2026
📍 Las Vegas, NV
Conference details
Identity Week Europe 2026
📅 June 9–10, 2026
📍 Amsterdam
Event information
Call for Co-organizers: GDC 2026
The 2026 Global Digital Collaboration Conference has been announced for September 1-2, 2026, in Geneva. DIF is on the co-organizing committee
🗓️ ️DIF Members
👉Are you a DIF member with news to share? Email us at communication@identity.foundation with details.
🆔 Join DIF!
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