September 2026
DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive
Table of contents
- Decentralized Identity Foundation News
- Steering Committee Updates
- GDC Update
- Working Group Updates
- Upcoming Events
- Get involved! Join DIF
Decentralized Identity Foundation News
Steering Committee Elections are around the corner, with nominations opening on October 5. Any Associate or Contributing member can be nominated for a two-year term as a Steering Committee Member. Check out this blog for the full timeline and more about why you might want to join the SC.
Steering Committee Updates
Recent Steering Committee Meetings discussed the conversations on DIF's strategy going forward, and the consensus is that each Working Group has its own flavor in terms of how it wants to move forward, approach graduation of standards, or maintain itself within DIF. Strategically, working groups tend toward three potential directions:
- Commercial prototyping and practical implementations. (Hospitality and Travel, KYA-OS from TAAWG)
- Graduation to other standards bodies or to an independent path (CAAWG).
- Enjoying the freedom and flexibility of being a DIF WG (DID Methods, DIDcomm, Delegation Task Force of TAAWG)
As each working group reaches different levels of maturity, the working group members make choices for each of these directions. Based on the Steering Committee's discussions, DIF staff are making concerted outreach efforts to find out where DIF can serve the market.
Additional SC updates:
- Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which are not meeting regularly will be placed in dormant mode. A few SIGs have indicated that they will be reviving themselves in a few months, so look forward to that.
- DIDcomm Working Group has decided to continue its work within DIF, and not to pursue the opportunity at IETF. The current WG members would like to work on DIDcomm 3.0 rather than spend time and effort to pass an IETF RFC on a subset of DIDcomm capabilities.
GDC Update
September kicked off with the Global Digital Collaboration, a three-day identity-focused event in Geneva. Topics that stood out from the conference were interoperability, registries, and age assurance.
DIF members participated in a number of talks and panels. CAWG co-chair Scott Perry presented CAWG, Dock Labs held a panel on business wallets and telcos as identity providers, Mitchell Travers moderated a panel on Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration on DLTs, and DIF's friends at FIDES presented awards for the best wallets in a number of categories.
DIF's good friends, Trust over IP Foundation, showed incredible progress with the work being done on the OpenVTC Project. DIF member Glenn Gore from Affinidi is leading the way on that one, along with lead developer Geoff Turk, and Drummond Reed leading the team. With did:webs under the hood, the project showed off their progress, including the ability to bridge KERI and DIDs! Geoff's recent blog post provides a fascinating peek into how they are developing a UI that holds no information.
Check out their slide deck here.
OpenID Foundation and the EUID wallet featured strongly, with a series on different approaches and architectures for business wallets.
GDC itself is breaking off to become its own entity, with Open Wallet Foundation folding into the LFDT Foundation.
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
- Most of the August 24 meeting focused on whether CAWG should create a separate entity rather than continuing to be part of DIF. An in-person "Future of CAWG" meeting is planned in New York for the first week of October. Reach out to Eric Scouten for details.
- CAWG is implementing a fix donated by Robert Angelo, which will repair a portion of the CAWG certificate resolution areas that have been coming up on the CAWG user groups on C2PA's Discord.
- The issue of some C2PA validators not performing CAWG validation properly will be addressed by Eric vis-a-vis C2PA, and there is a potential that CAWG/DIF could provide a validator node if that is a work item CAWG wants to address.
- Matthew Rappard reported unexpectedly strong interest from the Model Context Protocol (MCP) community after pitching C2PA/CAWG as a solution to unsigned, unattributed "skill files" being uploaded for AI agents. His pitch required no changes to MCP itself, only a recommendation that provenance data be expressed via C2PA/CAWG.
- The CAWG UX task force is making progress on integrating trust registry prioritization and choice for creators.
- CAWG vLEI task force is working on a unified technical specification for identity assertions and addressing challenges with infrastructure dependencies
- The Definitions task force is working on digital asset definitions, digital identity, copyright and fair use, data standards, metadata, performer identity, consent requirements, and human participant identity
Trusted AI Agents Working Group
The Trusted AI Agents working group keeps humming along on its long-term work commitments, and regrettably the cadence of guest presentations and demos has slowed down a bit (with the notable exception of Erik Passoja's presentation of some CAWG-related work!). If you have a demo relevant to our scope, feel free to reach out to the Chairs for a time-slot.
The Delegated Authority task force was hard at work on editorial overhauling and gluing together contributions from many members into the evaluations section of the report, which finally has a problem-space section, a solution-evaluation section, and appendices for governance and threat modeling, i.e., a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some sections are still being worked on before an official v1 release, but it can be read through start to finish for those eager to review or understand the pitch for Decentralized Authorization more generally.
The KYA-OS working group has mostly spent the last month focusing on how KYA-OS fits into the evolving landscape of MCP's "official extensions", registries, and directories. Dylan prepared bespoke demos for multiple conferences and launched a registry of projects using KYA-OS, where recordings and code from those demos can be found. Readers using the KYA-OS reference implementation in production or in the laboratory, or re-implementing it from the specification, are warmly invited to register there and showcase their work (including as a context for extensions they are proposing, such as support for other DID methods or authorization/policy receipt formats!).
Hospitality and Travel Working Group
The Hospitality and Travel Working Group continues work on HATPro, adding schemas around hotel preferences, entertainment preferences, medical requirements, and religious content. H&T members are actively participating in industry conferences and exploring sponsorship opportunities for outreach.
DIDComm Working Group
The DIDComm Working Group took a break for the US holidays. After deliberation, the WG chairs have decided that the effort to pursue an IETF RFC is not where they want to focus. The concerns were that it would be more than a year of effort, and what might pass at the IETF would undergo significant modification and reduction in scope. Many group members have expressed excitement about scoping and developing the next iteration of DIDcomm. The WG will continue its momentum towards DIDcomm 3.0.
DID Methods Working Group
The Recommended DID Methods Working Group has two methods currently in the review period: did:hedera and did:soul.
Identifiers and Discovery Working Group
Coming back from Summer Hiatus, the I&D working group has already hosted some fascinating discussions, including a presentation from did:julia architect Ken Griggs about how his Chia-blockchain-based DID methods and its unique properties. These include a fit-for-selective-disclosure design where each property is a separate record (and each portable claim a separate credential), and Chia-specific "puzzle"-based proof of work. A discussion of commonalities in how various known DID Methods use IPFS tooling to handle and circulate DID Documents was also had, which is continuing at the meeting on the 21st.
Work on ThisDID continues unabated, with some authors of drivers (whether dockerized or as NPM-packages in TypeScript, or both) discussing the nuances of specification and resolution algorithms with MG to ensure formal equivalence across these pre-existing driver form factors and the way ThisDID wraps these. Complex discussions are still ongoing about how the ThisDID resolvers can route queries against methods whose drivers that cannot be confidently written as TypeScript/NPM packages, and how public instances of these dockerized resolver "workers" can opt into or out of this proxied resolution (for now, providers who are DIF members can fine-tune which methods they want to serve by PRing the routing table directly.
Applied Crypto Working Group
The Applied Crypto Working Group discussed ongoing work on BBS and BLS binding implementations, with Vasilis reviewing the code and noting potential changes needed in a PR.
DIDComm User Group
The DIDComm user group continues to host a variety of demos of DIDComm use.
📢 Upcoming Events
AGNTcon and MCPcon
📅 September 17-18, 2026
📍 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Event information
Look out for DIF Tech Lead Juan Caballero at the conference
AIdentity & Non-Human Identity Impact Day 2026
📅 October 6, 2026
📍 Munich, Germany
Event information
Grace Rachmany will be presenting the work of TAAWG in the talk "Who authorized that transaction?"
Internet Identity Workshop
📅 November 2-5, 2026
📍 Mountain View, California
Event Information
Free side events: VRM Day and miniKERICONF will take place on November 2
Agentic Internet Workshop
📅 November 6, 2026
📍 Mountain View, California
Event Information
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 127
📅 November 14-20, 2026
📍 San Francisco, California
Event Information
2026 SEDI Summit
📅 November 17-19, 2026
📍 Salt Lake City, Utah
Event Information
👉Are you a DIF member with news to share? Email us at communication@identity.foundation with details.
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