An identifier you control

Most IDs come from someone else. A government gives you a passport number. A company gives you a username. They can take it back or shut down.

A decentralized identifier, or DID, is an ID you make yourself. No office hands it out. No company can delete it. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) set the standard, so many systems can read the same kind of ID.

On the XRP Ledger, your account can create one DID. Your keys control it. Only you can change it or remove it.

A DID is a name tag, not a proof. Anyone can make a DID and write anything on it. So the model has three roles:

• The user holds the DID.
• An issuer checks facts about the user, away from the ledger, and signs a statement. That statement is a verifiable credential.
• A verifier needs to know something about the user. It looks up the DID and checks the issuer's statement.

A simple case: a site wants to know you passed an identity check. You show your DID and a credential from a checker the site trusts. The site confirms both. Your passport scan never touches the ledger.

xrpl.org lists uses such as identity checks for KYC and AML rules, signing documents, website logins and tiered access to DeFi apps.

The DID feature went live on mainnet on 2024-10-30.

The XRP Ledger's implementation conforms to the W3C DID v1.0 specification. XLS-40 defines the did:xrpl method.

The flow in xrpl.org's terms:

1. An account holder generates a DID controlled by the account.
2. The DID is associated with a DID document, as defined by W3C.
3. The user gives a verifier the DID and a verifiable credential (VC).
4. The verifier resolves the DID to its document and uses the VC to verify authenticity.

A DID document holds what is needed to verify the subject cryptographically, such as public keys the subject can use to authenticate. The subject can be a person, an organization or a thing. Documents usually serialize to JSON or JSON-LD.

Principles named in the docs:

• Decentralization. No central agency controls the DID. The owner can update, resolve or deactivate it.
• Verifiable credentials. A DID's contents can be false. Authenticity comes from a VC that is cryptographically secure and tamper-evident.
• Interoperability. Any solution that recognizes the W3C standard can use the DID.

XLS-40 states two limits on its scope. It is not a competing identity standard. It reuses the W3C one. And it aims at individual users who keep full control of their keys and of the identity object's contents.

The ledger part is small: one ledger entry type, DID, and two transactions, DIDSet and DIDDelete. Verifiable credentials themselves are a W3C format that lives off the ledger. The XRP Ledger added a separate on-ledger feature for attestations in 2025: Credentials.

Related: Wallets, keys and safety.