Digital credentials, explained.
Guides for registrars, programme managers and HR teams who need to understand verifiable credentials before they choose a provider. Written by the team that builds SAPIO.
Guides
What are verifiable credentials? A guide for education and HR.
A verifiable credential is a certificate in digital form that is cryptographically signed by the organisation that issues it. The holder keeps it in a digital wallet and presents it when needed. Anyone who receives it can check, in seconds and without contacting the issuer, that it is authentic, unchanged and still valid.
Read the guideMicro-credentials and the EU Digital Identity Wallet.
Micro-credentials certify the learning outcomes of short courses. The EU asks for them to be portable and verifiable, and the EU Digital Identity Wallet gives every citizen a place to keep them. Issuing micro-credentials as verifiable credentials in wallet-compatible formats lets learners reuse them across institutions and borders.
Read the guideswiyu, the Swiss e-ID and digital certificates in education.
swiyu is the wallet and trust infrastructure of the Swiss Confederation. Besides the state e-ID, it can hold credentials from other issuers, including educational institutions. Swiss schools and training providers can issue verifiable certificates that learners keep in swiyu and present to employers.
Read the guidePDF certificates vs. verifiable credentials.
A PDF shows information to a human reader; a verifiable credential proves it to software. PDFs can be edited and must be confirmed by the issuer. Verifiable credentials are signed, checked automatically, let the holder share only what is needed, and can be revoked.
Read the guideCertificates in swiyu: what Swiss schools need to know.
Issuing certificates into swiyu means that an institution appears in the federal wallet under its own verified name and signs its credentials itself. The Confederation runs the wallet and the trust infrastructure; everything that issues, withdraws and maintains the credentials is run by the institution or by a provider on its behalf. Most of the work for a school is not technical but organisational: which certificates, who may sign them, and how learners are brought on board.
Read the guideChoosing a verifiable credentials provider: a checklist for education.
A good provider for digital certificates issues with the open standards that swiyu and the EU Digital Identity Wallet support, lets the institution sign under its own identity, describes learning achievements so that other institutions understand them, supports withdrawal, and can be replaced without losing the credentials already issued. The questions below make these properties checkable in a tender or a first call.
Read the guide
Glossary
The terms you will meet in tenders, standards and wallet documentation.
- Verifiable credential
- A digitally signed statement about a person or organisation, held in a wallet and checkable by anyone without contacting the issuer.
- Issuer
- The organisation that creates and signs a credential, for example a university or training provider.
- Holder
- The person who receives, stores and presents a credential, usually the learner.
- Verifier (relying party)
- The organisation that checks a presented credential, for example an employer.
- Digital wallet
- An app that stores credentials and presents them on request, such as the EUDI Wallet or swiyu.
- SD-JWT VC
- A credential format based on JSON Web Tokens with selective disclosure, specified at the IETF and used by EU and Swiss wallets.
- Selective disclosure
- Sharing only some fields of a credential. Undisclosed fields remain as salted hashes that reveal nothing.
- OpenID4VCI
- OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance: the OpenID Foundation protocol for issuing credentials into a wallet.
- OpenID4VP
- OpenID for Verifiable Presentations: the OpenID Foundation protocol for presenting credentials to a verifier.
- did:webvh
- A decentralised identifier method that anchors an issuer’s identity in its own web domain, with a verifiable history of key changes.
- Status list
- A published, signed list that tells verifiers whether a credential has been revoked or suspended.
- European Learning Model (ELM)
- The EU data model for describing learning opportunities and achievements, used by Europass Digital Credentials.
- Micro-credential
- A record of the learning outcomes of a small, assessed unit of learning, as defined in the 2022 Council Recommendation.
- EUDI Wallet
- The European Digital Identity Wallet that each EU member state provides under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183.
- eIDAS 2.0
- Common name for Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, which establishes the European Digital Identity Framework.
- swiyu
- The wallet app and trust infrastructure of the Swiss Confederation, used for the Swiss e-ID and other credentials.
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