April 2026
DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive
Table of contents
- Decentralized Identity Foundation News
- Update from the Executive Director: Specification Graduation
- Working Group Updates
- Upcoming Events
- Get involved! Join DIF
🚀 Decentralized Identity Foundation News
Spring marks the start of conference season! We've got a bunch of upcoming events.
- We've kicked off the spring with participation in the ITU's Study Group 17 event, Trustable and Interoperable Digital Identities for Human and Agentic AI, where DIF member Damian Glover participated. The event was more successful than expected, and the ITU received the go-ahead from member states to create a public Focus Group on Agentic AI. The Focus Group is intended to be open for allthat will be open to all in the coming months. DIF will be participating in the upcoming Global interoperability for trust management of digital identity for humans and agents at the start of June.
- Damian will be inviting one or two of the speakers for a HOT TAKE... look out for the date in the DIF calendar if you're ITU-curious or tracking agentic topics.
- We have an open call for speakers to speak or convene sessions at the Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) in September. DIF is one of the co-organizers, and we can work with you to submit a proposal for a talk or panel. For details, send email to ed@ (our domain).
- The Upcoming Hot Take talk will be with Executive Director Grace Rachmany, going over her visit to Asia Pacific. In her recent blog, Grace wrote about the trip. She'll be discussing here takes on how identity is being implemented for humans and AI in Asia, and there will be an AMA. Join at 8 am UTC on April, 23 (the usual time for the APAC SIG)
Update from the Executive Director: Specification Graduation
Historically, DIF specifications have taken different paths after being completed in DIF, and as an organization, we haven't put much public focus on what happens "after DIF" in recent years. At this point in our maturity as an organization, we are starting to give more consideration to the idea of "graduation", that is, what happens to a specification or repository after DIF has completed its work.
Fundamentally, we have made DIF very low-bureaucracy as a kind of lightweight SDO. This means we are able to produce specification, code, and research much more quickly than large international standards bodies. But it also means that some of the work doesn't go on to implementation, or the implementations are limited. There's nothing wrong with that, but we feel it's time for us to be more deliberate in how "standards graduation" comes about. Over the 6 years of DIF's existence, we've done incredible work, and we've learned a lot about what paths are (and aren't) open to us.
Right now, DIF has begun steps in two potential directions for graduation and adoption of specifications.
One path to graduating standards is through more formal SDOs, which can slot cleanly into regulations and international agreements. DIF members have long been involved with both community and normative work at W3C, and DIF is going to be actively working more closely with W3C as well as looking to identify a chairperson for their working group on DID methods. We've also begun discussions with the ITU regarding participation in their Study Group 17. The ITU prides itself on moving faster than other international standards bodies in terms of Agentic AI security, and being in on early conversations will provide graduation paths for the work being done in the Trusted Agentic AI Working Group (TAAWG). The work with W3C and the ITU will require additional dedicated budget, so DIF will be organizing an earmarked fund for each of these activities. If your organization is interested in participating in either of these standards bodies, or in supporting DIF more generally to secure credibly neutral representation in these bodies, please write directly to ed@ (our domain).
The second graduation path is in helping our members move from working group specifications to operational prototypes. The work on that happens within the working groups, and specifically within smaller task forces focused on practical implementation. This work is primarily the responsibility of the working group chairpeople. DIF has begun a series of training sessions for Working Group chairs, and we'll be actively adding to that knowledge library to help WG chairs be more effective in their work.
Working Group Updates
DIF Members are welcome to join and participate in any working group. Most working groups meet on a weekly basis, and the most active groups have task force meetings that focus on specific work items. All public meetings are recorded and you can find all of the information on our working groups here.
Creator Assertions Working Group
CAWG has been diligently working on version 1.2 of the CAWG Identity Assertion specifications, in particular updates in the Trust Model for CAWG Identity Signing Certificates. The upcoming work scheduled includes optional KERI-specific parsing logic to the Identity Assertion Specification, Creating a Creators Advisory Group together with C2PA, and exploring a trust anchor for identity assertions.
Currently, CAWG has three ongoing task forces:
- VC/VP: Incorporating new kinds of identifiers and claim verification logics.
- Trust: Creating distributed trust ecosystems over specific claims.
- Consent: Exploring ways to encode consent and legal claims on digital assets.
Trusted AI Agents Working Group
In the last four meetings, the Trusted AI Agents Working Group has continued refining the Delegated 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. (One nice side-effect of this apples-to-apples framework is noticing rough equivalents across the terminologies and mental models of radically different protocols and approaches.)
Similar work on [variously machine-readable] policy and governance has also spawned an early draft of an adjacent problem-space report. This potential task force is waiting in the wings for the right champion looking to prototype machine-readable governance, generate some contractual boilerplate (what does a good audit trail for agentic delegations enable at the service level agreement level?), a more detailed report, or any other form of DIF deliverable.
Recent conversations addressed concrete implementation details, which might be harder or easier to model (and secure) depending on the protocols and infrastructures chosen. Examples include 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 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. Prototyping the chained-delegation and authorization receipt architecture proposed in the other task force with the reference implementation formerly known as MCP-i is proceeding cautiously, by mapping out the consequences of expressing these capabilities inside of the "envelope" of a verifiable credential or as a distinct kind of object with different verification flows.
Hospitality and Travel Working Group
DIF’s Hospitality and Travel Working Group continues to update the schemas for the Hospitality and Travel Profile (HATPro). The team is working on Github updates, content strategy, and contact management for participants in the HATPro database. As they continue to expand their database of use cases, they are looking to have better tracking of the participants outside of DIF.
DIDComm Working Group and User Group
The DIDComm working group had a roundtable discussion this month about MCP and the use of DIDComm as an potential method for Agent to Agent communication.
In the most recent DIDComm user group, the following PR status was reviewd:
- Pending migration of the static site build and deployment process from Gatsby to Hugo. Main changes involve removing the Gatsby workflow, adding a new Hugo workflow, and introducing a Hugo archetype template for content creation.
- Vinay Singh's contributions include a new protocol for
peer-to-peer expense tracking and a recent PR for adding vault support (storage systems that hold documents and logs for
multi-party activities and secure versioning management) to workflows. - Updates to the DIDComm protocol, including a new implementation by Hologram and DigiCred.
The group had a discussion about the calendar use case for AI agents, where people's agents could be deployed to coordinate meetings. The discussion was based on an app in development by Dave McKay. The group discussed different levels of authorization.
DID Methods Working Group
Big news: the DID Methods Working group welcomes new co-chairperson Christian Saucier! Christian will be stepping in as Marcus Sabadello continues to serve as a Steering Committee Member. Great news for the DID Methods Working group and great news for DIF, as we can better balance the responsbilities among more people. In early April, Christian demoed the work he has been doing on a blockchain-based did:cid method.
Over the last month, most of the work on DID Methods has focused on did:webplus, with integration of the changes from a code review, and update of policy. (PR 77 and PR 93). They have also begun consideration of did:ethr to go through the recommended methods process. The working group also hosted a presentation from the Hospitality and Travel Working group regarding a use case for travel disruption.
Identifiers and Discovery Working Group
The IDWG has been moving forward in discussions around did:webvh. In this month's meeting they discussed the work being done at Affinidi around the Rust implementation for code maintainers in the Linux project. The working group has approved a PR addressing denial of service concerns. The group discussed different approaches to presentation credentials, and discussed security concerns around some of the recent PRs. The Working Group will be adding a threat modeling document to the web:vh information site. Upcoming meetings will address UNTP and Whois features.
Applied Crypto Working Group
The ACWG has been covering different cryptographic approaches,as well as concerns regarding advances in quantum computing. The Working group is specifically comparing ECDSA curves and pseudonym systems. The group is actively seeking more participation from DIF members interested in this issue. Specifically, the question has arisen about whether it's best to implement a modular approach with P-256 binding or if the pseudonym approach would suffice, noting that the pseudonym approach might be sufficient even if it sacrificed some efficiency gains from additional blinding features.
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! We are going to list selected AI and other industry events only if there are DIF members speaking or attending.
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
ITU Workshop on "Global interoperability for trust management of digital identity for humans and agents"
📅 June 2, 2026
📍 Geneva
Event information
GDC 2026
📅 September 1-3, 2026
📍 Geneva
Event information
Tickets
To apply for a speaking opportunity or get tickets for GDC, please contact us directly.
👉Are you a DIF member with news to share? Email us at communication@identity.foundation with details.
🆔 Join DIF!
If you would like to get in touch with us or become a member of the DIF community, please visit our website or follow our channels:
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.
