The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a Candidate Recommendation Snapshot of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.1, indicating that the specification is technically sound and complete and inviting the implementation community to test its stability ahead of a formal recommendation.
The update, published by the W3C Decentralized Identifier Working Group, revises the DID v1.0 specification from 2022. The v1.1 document covers DID syntax, a common data model, core properties, serialized representations, DID operations, and the process for resolving DIDs to the resources they represent. Stakeholders have been invited to submit comments via GitHub by April 5, 2026.
A Candidate Recommendation Snapshot in the W3C process signals that a specification has reached a stage of technical completeness sufficient for testing by implementors. Substantive comments can still be submitted, but the expectation is that the core design is stable. The W3C also maintains a public list of known DID methods at its specifications hub.
Decentralized identifiers assign globally unique identifiers to subjects, including people, organizations, and devices, without relying on a central registry or certificate authority. Each DID resolves to a DID document containing public keys, verification methods, and service endpoints, enabling authentication and credential verification in a decentralized architecture.
Adoption of the standard has grown across the digital identity sector since v1.0. Microsoft integrated DID support into its Entra Verified ID platform in 2022, and identity companies including Dock and Vouched have built DID-based workflows into their products. Nuggets developed its AI agent authentication offering around the DID standard. The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) works alongside W3C on complementary specifications and interoperability standards that extend DID-based implementations across enterprise, government, and machine identity use cases.
The broader push toward decentralized identity architecture has gained momentum as governments and enterprises seek alternatives to federated identity models that concentrate user data in centralized systems. DID-based credentials are being explored for digital travel documents, workforce identity, and cross-border identity verification, making a stable and widely implemented specification increasingly material to emerging identity infrastructure.
The v1.1 update reflects refinement and clarification of the original standard rather than a structural overhaul, a signal that the DID model has matured sufficiently for large-scale implementation planning.
Sources: W3C, W3C DID Working Group
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By Ji-seo Kim
