VC <> mDL Project Stakeholder Interviews

Full summary report viewable here

On September 12, 2022, Identity Woman in Business announced a community project “Where the W3C VCs meets the ISO 18013–5 mDL” sponsored by Spruce to help:

• Enable a bigger ecosystem of players to take advantage of mobile driving licenses by making sure the VCs are a viable alternative for implementers to the ISO 18013–5 standard, and are compatible to the fullest extent possible of the outputs of ISO working groups
• Give both VC and mDL wallet vendors equal opportunity to compete and provide users with options by urging the open-up of privileged, internal APIs for all wallet vendors and developers.

Following the announcement, we hosted the first community session on September 27, answering questions about the project, understanding relevant existing efforts and gathering initial input for the project deliverables.

Based on the input from the session, we proceeded with conducting seven one-on-one interviews with:

• Manu Sporny, Founder and CEO of Digital Bazaar
• Brent Zundel, Principal Cryptography Engineer at Avast
• Tobias Looker, CTO at MATTR
• David Kelts (CIPT), Director of Product Development, Mobile ID at GET Group North America
• Christopher Goh, General Manager, Registration and Licensing Modernisation, Department of Transport and Main Roads (Queensland Government)
• Torsten Lodderstedt, CTO at Yes.com
• Oliver Terbu, Director Identity Standards at Spruce (together with Wayne Chang, CEO at Spruce)

Our interviewees are implementers of both or either standards or working closely with implementers. Most of them are involved in both or either standard groups, or community groups relevant to both standards.

The interviews have helped us gain a variety of perspectives and zoom in on some of the key challenges faced by the two standards groups as well as the implementers. Emerging out of those challenges are looming opportunities for alignment and better market awareness.

We spent a significant chunk of our interview time understanding the challenges and implications of limited API access (particularly on iOS devices) for third-party wallet providers, which was not discussed much during the community session.

As a result of the interviews, we wrote a report that summarizes the perspectives of interviewees based on the following categories of questions/discussions:

• Current development of both and related standards as well as challenges and concerns
• Aspiration for more alignment and where the opportunities are
• Limited API access for third party developers and the implications of such limitations

We know that there may be missing perspectives due to the limited amount of community sessions and interviews we are able to do at this point. We are committed to keeping learning and listening, particularly at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW). We look forward to hearing your back through emails (kaliya@identitywoman.net and lucy@identitywoman.net.)or seeing you in our community session at the IIW.