Manu Sporny
- Co-creator of the W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers work
- Co-creator and maintainer of JSON-LD
- Founder and CEO of Digital Bazaar
Bio
Manu Sporny founded Digital Bazaar and helped start the W3C work that became Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, and JSON-LD. Verifiable Credentials 2.0 reached W3C Recommendation in 2025.
Profile built from public W3C and company records.
Where their work shows up
Verifiable credentials and DIDs are the data model under nearly every wallet-based identity scheme now being deployed, including the EUDI wallet and mobile driving licences. The design goal is selective disclosure: proving you are over eighteen without handing over a birth date, address, and document number. See what is decentralized identity and the best verifiable credential platforms ranking.
Related on Start with Identity
- PodcastA Digital Identity Digest
Short weekly episodes from standards veteran Heather Flanagan that "translate geek to human" on identity standards, wallets, and the web platform.
- PodcastTrinsic
Trinsic CEO Riley Hughes interviews the people launching identity products: wallets, mobile IDs, verification, and verifiable organisation identity.
- PodcastUbisecure
Ubisecure's interview show with identity leaders, 102 episodes on digital identity, organisation identity, and governance. No new episode since January 2024.
- ExpertChairman
Nat Sakimura has chaired the OpenID Foundation for many years and is a primary author of the OpenID Connect specifications and the FAPI security profile used by
- ExpertCo-author of TLS 1.0 and the W3C DID specification
Christopher Allen co-authored the IETF TLS 1.0 specification, co-authored the W3C Decentralized Identifiers specification, and in 2016 published The Path to Sel
- ExpertCo-chair, OpenID Shared Signals working group
Annabelle Backman is a principal security engineer on AWS Identity and co-chairs the OpenID Shared Signals and Events working group. She edited RFC 8935 and RFC