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How It Works

Partisia's Decentralized Identity product provides the infrastructure for the full credential lifecycle, from issuance to verification, built on a range of open standards for interoperability.

Three components do the work, and a fourth thing — trust — is what makes them fit together.

  • The issuer provides holders with verifiable credentials (VCs) — a trusted proof of information, such as confirming a student's status. It generates credentials, signs them, and delivers them to the holder's wallet. Credentials support selective disclosure, so a holder can later reveal only part of a credential while keeping the rest private. An issuer can also revoke a credential it has issued.
  • The wallet is the holder's personal digital vault. It stores the credentials received from issuers and gives the holder control over when and how to share them. When a verifier asks, the wallet assembles a verifiable presentation — signed by the wallet, containing only the claims the holder approved — and sends it back.
  • The verifier confirms the validity and authenticity of what a holder presents. It checks the cryptographic signatures on the credential and the presentation, so it knows the information is accurate, came from an issuer it trusts, and has not been tampered with.

The verifier never contacts the issuer to do this. That is the point, and it is what the trust model provides: credentials carry an X.509 certificate chain in their signature, and a verifier decides whether to accept a credential by examining that chain. Nothing needs to be looked up online at verification time.

Both the issuer and the verifier keep their own state in PostgreSQL.

An Example: Student IDs

Consider a scenario where a student, Alice, needs to prove her enrollment status to access a bookshop discount.

The school acts as the issuer, creating and cryptographically signing a verifiable credential that asserts Alice's enrollment status, among other pieces of personal information. The signature carries the school's certificate. This credential is sent to Alice, who stores it in a digital wallet on her smartphone.

When Alice wants to claim a discount at a bookshop, which acts as a verifier, she can use selective disclosure to share only the part of the credential that confirms her student status, without revealing unrelated personal details. With a traditional student card, Alice would have to hand over the whole thing, revealing every piece of data printed on it.

Alice approves the disclosure of her student status in her wallet. This generates a verifiable presentation of her credential, cryptographically signed by her wallet. The presentation is sent to the bookshop's verifier, which checks the signature on the presentation, checks the school's signature on the credential inside it, and confirms that the certificate in that signature is one the bookshop is willing to trust. The results are pushed to the bookshop's own application so it can decide whether to grant the discount.

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