Verifiable credential (VC)

A digitally signed set of claims that a holder can present to a verifier without contacting the issuer - the pattern behind EUDI Wallet attestations.

A verifiable credential is a digitally signed set of claims about a person, organisation or thing, issued by one party (the issuer) to be held by another (the holder) and shown to a third party (the verifier), who can check its authenticity and integrity without contacting the issuer directly. The claims are bound to the credential through a cryptographic signature, so a verifier only needs the issuer's public key and, where relevant, a revocation check such as a status list to trust the content. The pattern separates issuance from use: a holder can collect credentials over time and present only what a given interaction requires, often through selective disclosure.

The term comes from the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model, the standard that first formalised the issuer-holder-verifier model in an interoperable, machine-readable way. In the EU's EUDI Wallet, the same pattern underlies what eIDAS calls an electronic attestation of attributes: the wallet holds credentials encoded as SD-JWT or mdoc, issued against an authentic source and presented to relying parties through protocols such as OpenID4VC. Not every verifiable credential meets eIDAS requirements - only those that do can carry the legal weight of a QEAA or Pub-EAA.