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PTI and Verifiable Credentials

Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are cryptographically signed, tamper-evident digital claims — diplomas, licenses, employment attestations, KYC passes — issued by authoritative parties and presented by holders. PTI does not replace VC standards; it provides infrastructure to issue, verify, and compose credentials into context-scoped trust intelligence.

1. What verifiable credentials are​

VCs follow W3C and regional profiles (eIDAS 2.0, ISO mobile documents) with:

  • Issuer — signs claims about a subject
  • Holder — stores and presents credentials in a wallet
  • Verifier — validates signature, revocation status, and schema
  • Trust registries — issuer accreditation and schema governance
  • Selective disclosure — reveal minimum necessary attributes (ZKP extensions)

VCs answer: Is this signed claim valid, current, and from a trusted issuer?

2. What problem verifiable credentials solve​

ProblemVC response
Paper credential fraudCryptographic integrity
Over-disclosure of PIISelective disclosure
Issuer verificationDID / X.509 trust chains
Offline verificationSigned payloads without live issuer call

VCs excel at portable attestations. They do not alone provide continuous behavioral trust, multi-partner signal fusion, or context-scoped scoring engines for lending, rental, and merchant decisions.

3. What PTI adds​

Verifiable credentials

  • Signed static or semi-static claims
  • Holder-presented verification
  • Issuer-centric trust chain

PTI adds

  • VC as trust evidence — verified credentials become graph edges
  • Continuous signals — ongoing events complement point-in-time VCs
  • Context-scoped lookup — employment VC weights in employment context
  • Institution-scale API — batch lookup without per-holder wallet UX

PTI's Trust Evidence model accommodates verification hooks — VC signature validation results attach provenance to trust outcomes. Verifier institutions may consume credentials through PTI verification APIs rather than bespoke wallet integrations per use case.

4. How they compose together​

Integration patterns:

  1. Verifier-as-producer — institution validates VC, emits verification.passed trust event with schema ID and issuer DID.
  2. Wallet-to-lookup — subject presents VC; platform verifies and refreshes trust graph before institution lookup.
  3. Hybrid — static VC (degree, professional license) plus dynamic signals (payroll events, project completions) in employment context.

PTI does not mandate a specific VC format — implementations SHOULD profile W3C VC Data Model or regional equivalents in Interoperability bindings.

5. When to use each​

ScenarioVerifiable credentialsPTI
Prove university degree onceVC idealOptional (store verification)
Monitor seller trust over 12 monthsVC alone insufficientPTI merchant context
Government issues national digital ID VCVC / eIDPTI as trust exchange layer
Institution batch pre-screen 10,000 applicantsWallet UX heavyPTI lookup API
Cross-border credential recognitionVC standardsPTI federation profiles

Use VCs for signed attestations; use PTI to operationalize those attestations alongside behavioral trust at institution scale.

See also​