A stamp from an issuer

A bouncer does not read your birth certificate. The bouncer looks for a stamp on your hand. Someone at the door checked your ID once and stamped you. Every bar on the street that trusts that door can use the same stamp.

A credential on the XRP Ledger is that stamp.

Three roles are involved:

• The issuer checks you and gives the stamp.
• The user is you. The stamp goes on your account.
• The authorizer is the bar. It only deals with accounts that carry a stamp it trusts.

How it goes:

1. A business decides it will only deal with accounts vetted by a certain issuer.
2. You send your documents to that issuer, privately, off the ledger.
3. The issuer checks them and writes a credential for your account.
4. You accept it. Now it is valid.
5. You can deal with the business.

Your documents never go on the ledger. The business never sees them. It sees only that the issuer vouched for your account.

One check can serve many places. Any other business that trusts the same issuer can accept the same credential.

What can a credential say? Anything the issuer defines. xrpl.org gives three examples:

• The user is not under sanctions from a certain country.
• The user is an accredited investor in the US.
• The user reached a certain level in a video game.

The ledger does not judge the claim. A credential is only as good as the account that issued it.

Credentials went live on mainnet on 2025-09-04.

A credential is a Credential ledger entry. Three values identify it:

XLS-70 compares CredentialType to an NFT's taxon: the issuer decides what the value means. Optional fields are Expiration and URI. The URI can link to more data, such as a W3C verifiable credential document. It holds up to 256 bytes.

The design draws on the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard and is compatible with it only as far as fits the ledger. One difference: the subject is an XRP Ledger address, not a URL.

Where credentials are used on the ledger

• Deposit Authorization: an account can accept payments from any sender that holds a given set of credentials.
• Permissioned domains: a domain lists accepted credentials, and features such as the permissioned DEX admit only holders.

xrpl.org notes that future amendments could gate other features with credentials, such as holding tokens, lending pools or AMM deposits. Those are not live.

Credentials can also back off-ledger decisions, especially with a DID. A tutorial on xrpl.org gives the example of checking professional certifications after verifying identity with a DID.

Privacy model. The information an issuer reviews can include personally identifiable data. It is never published or stored on the ledger. The public record is the triple above, plus any URI and Expiration. An issuer that puts personal data in URI or CredentialType defeats the design.

Audit. xrpl.org states that Halborn audited Credentials in January 2025 and that the minor issues found were addressed.

All three parties need XRP Ledger accounts. An issuer can also issue a credential to itself. The issuer and subject may be the same account.