With the European Union mandating digital wallets by the end of 2026, and Verifiable Credentials offering new, powerful, and cost-effective ways to solve identity fraud and simplify operations, you may be thinking it’s time to embrace decentralized identity and build your own Verifiable Credential system. You’ve got a developer team, they understand security — so it couldn’t be that difficult, right?
By Helen Garneau
It’s tempting to do things yourself. But there’s a reason a professional painter will almost certainly do a better and quicker job at painting your house than you will. And, when you price how much time it would take you, there’s a good chance a professional will probably end up costing you less too.
The same logic applies to building decentralized identity systems with Verifiable Credentials.
If you have a talented team of engineers, it’s easy to think, “we’ve got this.” They understand security, they can code, issuing and verifying a few credentials sounds simple enough.
But once you start digging into credential formats, protocols, interoperability, global standards, regulations, and governance, what seems like a quick project for a few developers quickly becomes a long, complex, and costly effort to build and maintain a secure, standards-compliant system.
How fast “We got this” turns into “Why did we do this?”
Decentralized identity makes data portable and cryptographically verifiable without the need for certificate authorities or centralized data management. Its vehicle is the Verifiable Credential, a way of sealing any kind of information in a digital container so that it cannot be altered and you can be certain of its origin.
If you trust the origin of the credential — say a passport office or a bank — you can trust that the information placed in the credential has not been altered. Verifiable Credentials are held in digital wallet apps and can be shared by the consent of the holder, whether a person or an organization, in privacy-preserving ways.
Verifiable Credentials are most commonly used to create instantly authenticatable versions of trusted documents, such as passports, driver’s licenses, but they can be created and held by devices for secure data sharing, or robots and AI agents, for authentication and permissioned data access.
The point of all this is that it transforms authentication, fraud prevention, privacy, security, and operational efficiency. You are able to remove usernames and passwords, centralized storage and multi-factor authentication and combine authentication and fraud prevention in a seamless, instant process.
A decentralized ecosystem consists of three parts: an issuer that creates and digitally signs the credential, a holder who keeps it in a digital wallet and presents it for authentication and access to resources, and a verifier or relying party that needs to authenticate the information presented for some purpose.
When building an ecosystem for a use case — say systems account access — here’s what you need to consider: There are, presently, three major credential formats, each with differing communications protocols. They’ve got to interoperate with each other and across different digital wallets according to whatever standards you want to align with. Which are you going to pick?
Then, you need to get them into people’s wallets. Which wallet? An existing one or do you need an SDK?
If you want to verify credentials, you should be able to verify thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — simultaneously. How do you do this when mobile devices don’t have fixed IP addresses? How are you going to establish offline verification? And how are you going to establish governance so that participants know who is a trusted issuer of a credential?
This is just a basic implementation — a foundation to build the kind of solutions the market wants. Are you also prepared to then develop integrated payments, integrated biometrics, digital travel credentials, document validation, and identity and delegated authority for AI agents and robots? You better be, because that’s where the market is now at.
There’s a reason Indicio was the first (and still the only) company to launch a complete, off-the-shelf solution for implementing Verifiable Credentials in both the Amazon and Google Cloud Marketplaces: We built a team composed of pioneers and leaders in decentralized identity, engineers and developers deeply engaged with the open source codebases and communities that have shaped this technology. They live and breathe this stuff every day. And even so, it still took years to build an interoperable, multi-credential, multi-protocol, system that can scale to country-level deployments.
If your team isn’t already familiar with the open-source codebases and the evolving international specifications and standards, how are they going to deliver in a realistic time frame at an acceptable cost?
The probability that your team is going to do all that we did in six months is… low.
The likelihood that they will end up blowing through a lot of your budget attempting to do this is… high.
Interoperability — everyone expects it
No one is going to buy a proprietary, siloed system. Decentralized identity is an architecture for data sharing and integrating markets into functioning ecosystems; if your solution can’t do this, can’t interoperate or scale, it’s missing out on key features that drive business growth. Sure, you may want to start by securing your SSO with a Verifiable Credential, but why limit the power of verification?
For example, one of the key failures of the mobile driver’s license (m/DL) in the U.S. is that so many implementations failed to make verification open to other parties. Think of all the ways an m/DL could be used to prove age or identity. A digital identity that’s locked into a narrow use case and proprietary verification is a wasted opportunity not least because verification can be monetized (Indicio’s m/DL is easily verifiable anywhere).
To make a system work with the rest of the world, it has to speak the relevant languages. That means following multiple standards and protocols that define how credentials are created, stored, and exchanged and, depending on what your needs are, for whatever specific credential workflow you want to deploy, keeping up with some or all of the following:
W3C Verifiable Credential Data Model (VCDM) — defines how credentials are structured and signed.
ISO/IEC 18013-5 and ICAO DTC — govern mobile driver’s licenses (mDL) and Digital Travel Credentials, ensuring global interoperability across borders and transport systems.
DIDComm and DID methods — specify how secure, peer-to-peer communication and decentralized identifiers work.
OpenID for Verifiable Credentials (OID4VC and OID4VP) — bridges decentralized identity with mainstream authentication systems like OAuth and OpenID Connect.
Each of these comes with its own working groups, test suites, and compliance updates. Building your own system means keeping pace with all of them and making sure your implementation doesn’t break every time a standard changes.
With off-the-shelf, you implement in days
Indicio Proven® eliminates the DIY risk. You have a way to start implementing a POC in days, pilot in weeks, launch in months. We’ve spent years doing the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. It’s the mature, field-tested Verifiable Credential infrastructure that governments, airports, and financial institutions already use.
Instead of building from scratch, you have everything you need to start building a solution, a product, or a service so your team is free to focus on things that make you money.
Indicio Proven can already handle country-level deployments and multi-credential workflows. It has been DPIA’d for GDPR. It comes with document validation and biometric authentication, a white-label digital wallet if you need one, a mobile SDK to add Verifiable Credentials to your apps. We’ve already mastered:
- Multiple credential formats (AnonCreds, SD-JWT VC, JSON-LD, mdoc/mDL)
- DIDComm and OID4VC/OID4VP communications protocols
- Digital Travel Credentials aligned with ICAO DTC-1 and DTC-2 specifications.
- Decentralized ecosystem governance
- Hosting on premise, in the cloud or as a SaaS product.
- A global, enterprise-grade blockchain-based distributed ledger for anchoring credentials
- Certified training in every aspect of decentralized identity
- Support packages
- Continuous updates
In one package, you get everything you need to build, deploy, and stay current with evolving standards, so your team doesn’t have to chase every update.
Deploy with confidence
There’s no shame in DIY, but for Verifiable Credentials, the smarter move is to build on top of something that already works. Indicio does the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters: using trusted digital identity to deliver value to your users. A Verifiable Credential system should give you trust, not technical debt.
In short: don’t reinvent the tech. Build with what’s already proven.
Want to do it right the first time? Let’s talk.
