March 2026
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Table of contents
🚀 Decentralized Identity Foundation News
The big highlight for the last month is the contribution of MCP-I from Vouched ID. Check out all of our highlights:
- Identities for AI Agents is an enormous challenge and DIF is honored to accept the contribution of MCP-I from Vouched-ID. The framework will be discussed and tweaked through the Trusted AI Agents Working Group. We strongly encourage anyone interested in Agentic AI identity to join this very practical implementation working group to give input and prototype the specifications as we lead the way towards an open source solution for Agentic AI accountability and safety. Membership in DIF is free for organizations smaller than 500 people.
- Updates from the new Executive Director: Grace Rachmany gives updates on her thoughts for the direction of DIF in 2026.
- DIF’s Hospitality and Travel Working Group has released the first published schema for the Hospitality and Travel Profile (HATPro).
MCP-I Contribution from Vouched
We are incredibly excited to announce that Vouched is formally donating the Model Context Protocol–Identity (MCP-I) specification (temporary name) to the Decentralized Identity Foundation. This contribution will serve as the foundation for our community to develop an open, interoperable standard for identity and delegation in the age of AI Agents.
As AI agents increasingly handle online interactions on behalf of humans—booking travel, managing accounts, and placing orders—the fundamental question of trust has become critical: Which agent is this, who authorized it, and what is it permitted to do? The current internet infrastructure simply isn't built to answer these new identity challenges.
The Trusted AI Agents Working Group will be driving work on the specification to promote its use and implementation.
Update from the Executive Director
After three months in the role as Executive Director, I wanted to say a few words about the direction for DIF in 2026. The caveat is that these are preliminary directions: we need to have some deeper discussions on the Steering Committee before these become official policy, but I can say a few things about the direction that DIF has been taking.
The biggest shift for DIF is moving towards identity solutions in areas affected by AI. Three of our working groups (TAAWG, H&T, and CAWG) are researching and developing work that addresses different aspects of AI.
The most obvious is our Trusted AI Agents Working Group (TAAWG), which was still in early phases when I joined. In the course of the last few months, the group has taken on a number of workstreams and are forming a strategy around one of DIF’s historical weaknesses: bringing a specification into production use within DIF. While many DIF specifications are widely used, typically the implementations have been done by other organizations outside of DIF. Around the recent contribution of MCP-I (working name) from Vouched, a coalition of startups has formed to develop one or two use cases and put them into prototyping.
The most encouraging trend in DIF is the collaboration among the groups. The Hospitality and Travel Group (H&T) has been hard at work with their use cases and is starting to work with members of TAAWG because many of their use cases relate to how Agents are used in the travel industry. Similarly, in the last week, the Creator Assertions Working Group (CAAWG) is looking at how Trusted Agents will play a role in acting on behalf of the content creators. CAAWG, at its core, is all about how to identify content produced by humans, from news content to artist creations. Needless to say, AI is playing a huge role in how CAAWG is developing its standards.
Agentic AI has an even stronger use case for decentralized AI than human identification. Agents can be spun up and spun down rapidly, having much more ephemeral existence than most humans. From that perspective, it’s easy to see how centralized databases identifying agents make no sense at all. If the Agent only exists for a few months, there’s no need for long-term centralized storage of identity information. Right now, DIF is actively interested in getting wide representation in the Agent-centric working groups to develop standards that hold up for a variety of use cases, and to show prototypes that can work in multiple industries. As one of the fastest-moving bodies for creating identity specifications, DIF is well-positioned to provide specifications and proto-standards fast enough to keep up with AI developments. And although DIDcomm was developed with person-to-person communication in mind, it’s singularly well-architected for transient communications among agents and devices as well.
However, this is a significant shift for DIF. Much of our work to date was focused on human identity, and most of our working groups are still around human identity and human communication. Our mission and vision was focused around human agency, privacy, and autonomy. Clearly, Agentic AI impacts all of these areas, and it is critical for us to address this technology. We would love to hear your feedback about how you see this trajectory, and how you see DIF’s role.
One of the most elegant attributes of DIF is its ability to shift focus along with the shifting focus of its members. At the same time, I want to say this out loud. The amount of energy on Agentic and non-human transactions may surpass the amount of energy being put into human identities if DIF continues on this trajectory. As Executive Director, it is not my role to make major strategic changes such as this one: that is up to the Steering Committee. Therefore, we will be taking the time to discuss what it means for the organization to be shifting in this direction, and how we will balance the different interests of long-term as well as new members.
🛠️ Working Group Updates
Browse our working groups here
Creator Assertions Working Group
CAWG spent a significant amount of time this month exploring the use of Trust Registries, including several presentations and the creation of two work streams around different governance models for (issuer, credential, and even verifier) registries and how these relationships can be modeled in credentials and verified. CAWG reached consensus regarding the shared responsibility of CAWG and Industry ecosystems to create governance frameworks and mechanisms supporting interoperable trust registries similar to those demonstrated by the IPTC; discussions are proceeding in parallel across various subgroups and liaison associations about possible backwards-compatible architectures. The group also started exploratory work on how to potentially embed and/or link to consent and rights assertions, which are more variable and nuanced (and changeable over time) than the simpler data model for Training and Data Mining Assertions already specified.
Trusted AI Agents Working Group
In the last four meetings, the Trusted AI Agents Working Group has continued refining the Agentic Authority Use Cases report, with discussions centered on how authority, delegation, and accountability can be expressed when agents act on behalf of people or organizations. The goal is a coarse "checklist" of desired capabilities and usecases, with which to execute a high-level assessment of "fitness for purpose" among various family trees of prior art.
Recent conversations focused on concrete scenarios — exploring how agents might authenticate, present credentials, merge credentials and permissions (or not), hold secrets (or not), and operate within clearly scoped boundaries. The group also discussed where existing DID and VC building blocks are sufficient, and where new patterns may be needed to support agent-to-agent interactions without eroding human control.
Hospitality and Travel Working Group
DIF’s Hospitality and Travel Working Group has released the first published schema for the Hospitality and Travel Profile (HATPro). HATPro enables a traveler or other consumer to easily send highly detailed preferences to travel suppliers and intermediaries, in order that they can create and deliver more personalized experiences. The standard already encompasses more than 1200 items, with early efforts focused on self-attested identity and communications preferences, dining preferences, and substance exposure risks. Accessibility requirements and lifestyle preferences will be added soon.
The core architecture for HATPro preferences allows a traveler to identify requirements and prohibitions as well as likes and dislikes. It uses a sliding scale to support the ranking of preferences (as in, I like most red wine, but I like Bordeaux better than Burgundy, and Burgundy better than Cotes du Rhone). It is being expanded to include detailed preferences for a hundred or more distinct travel, hospitality, and leisure sectors, including big ones like airlines and hotels, and niche activities like cooking classes, scuba diving, and bungee jumping. The working group is starting to actively engage with experts who can advise on the information operators need to effectively personalize experiences.
While the profile will ultimately contain thousands of nodes, there is no expectations that individuals would complete them all, or even a significant portion. Rather, fill out just what matters to them the most, or their AI agent can observe their behavior over time and propose updates that the traveler can accept, modify, or reject. Once information is in their HATPro profile, they can share it (in full, selectively, or progressively) with any operator or intermediary simply by pressing a button on their phone. The data exchanges are designed to be fully compliant with regulatory requirements such as GDPR. While designed for decentralized SSI, the schema is in fact agnostic to the communications protocol and fully consumable by legacy systems.
The schema is currently being staged into the DIF GitHub repository, but an early version is already available on a SharePoint site. The latest links can be found at https://htwg.identity.foundation/hatpro/
DID Methods Working Group
The DID Methods Working Group is making progress towards establishing selection criteria and accepting proposals for DID methods. They are evaluating mechanisms for measuring decentralization of methods, and recently evaluated the potential of self-certifying identifier methods. After an extended methodological (no pun intended) discussion, the "review period" has been paused for did:webs and did:webplus to remediate last-minute objections.
Identifiers and Discovery Working Group
The Identifiers and Discovery Working Group, along with its subgroups focusing on DID Traits and did:webvh, continues to make substantial progress towards specification readiness. Christian Saucier, new co-chair of DID Methods WG, came to the I&D call to workshop some universal-resolver ergonomics issues. The did:webvh group has been focusing on some upstream negotiations with the DID WG at W3C over DID URL pathing.
Applied Crypto Working Group
The Crypto BBS+ Work Item group discussed the progress of a new method called did:webplus, which is being finalized to align with cryptographic standards like Blake3 and SHA-3. The internet draft for the CFPG WG at IETF has been read and reviewed by the WG chairs.
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!
4th International Workshop on Trends in Digital Identity (TDI)
📅 April 20-21, 2026
📍 Verona, Italy
Learn more
KERICONF
📅 April 21-23, 2026
📍 Lehi, Utah USA
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
👉Are you a DIF member with news to share? Email us at communication@identity.foundation with details.
🆔 Join DIF!
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New Member Orientations
If you are new to DIF join us for our upcoming new member orientations. Find more information on DIF’s slack or contact us at community@identity.foundation if you need more information.
