Digital identity verification is the practice of confirming someone is who they claim to be, using digital evidence rather than a physical document check at a counter. For most of its history, that meant a photo of a driver’s license and a selfie. It is now starting to mean something different: accepting a government-issued digital ID that the person already holds in a wallet on their phone, and reading it directly.
I am the CEO and co-founder of Trinsic. We add digital IDs to identity verification workflows. When Filip Verley put five rapid-fire questions to me on Liminal’s Friday Five, I answered the first one in nine words, which he was kind enough to call brevity. Here is the version with the reasoning attached.
The assumption that turned out to be wrong
We have been at this for 7, almost 8 years. For the vast majority of that time, we were expecting the world to align on a common standard for digital IDs. Some standards did emerge. But the world remains far, far more fragmented than we originally thought it would be.
That assumption was not unreasonable. It was how every previous wave of digital infrastructure resolved, and the entire decentralized identity community was organized around the belief that convergence was a question of when. What it actually produced was a decade of building for a future that kept not arriving.
The turn came when we stopped treating fragmentation as a transitional problem and started treating it as the permanent shape of the market. We rebuilt the product to account for fragmentation rather than waiting for the standards to catch up, and eventually divested our decentralized identity assets to focus entirely on acceptance. Things started to go a lot better once we did.
I want to be precise about what changed, because it was not the technology. It was which problem we thought we were in business to solve. We had been trying to help the world converge. The actual job was absorbing the fact that it will not.
What buyers of digital identity verification still underestimate
Buyers still underestimate the complexity of integrating digital IDs. Not the concept. The integration.
Take something that sounds simple: accepting mobile driver’s licenses from Apple Wallet. If you are making the request from an iOS app, that is a different integration than making the request from a web browser. There is an approval process from Apple. You apply in two separate portals. None of that is unreasonable on Apple’s part, and all of it is work someone on your team has to do.
That is one wallet. In the United States alone, 21 states plus Puerto Rico now issue a standards-based mobile driver’s license, and those credentials are distributed across Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet, and roughly a dozen state-run apps. No single wallet covers the country. Coverage varies by state, by platform, and by which of the standard’s transmission methods each implementation actually supports.
That is one type of digital ID in one country. There are a lot of countries and a lot of digital IDs. The fragmentation and complexity are extreme, far beyond what I expected coming into this, and I think most people still underestimate it.
The practical consequence is that “we support digital IDs” is close to meaningless as a vendor claim. The useful questions are which wallets, in which states, from which surfaces, and what happens to the 94% of your users who do not have one yet. A verification flow that works beautifully for an Apple Wallet user in Arizona and falls over for everyone else is not a solution. It is a demo.
The next 12 to 18 months: adoption is a curve, not a number
People generally overestimate things in the short run and underestimate them in the long run. Digital IDs are a clean example.
When most people look at mobile driver’s licenses in the US, the first question is always adoption. How many people actually have this? The honest answer today is not many. We are still in single-digit percentages outside a handful of concentrated states, and enrollment milestones in places like New York get celebrated precisely because they are hard-won. Anyone looking for a reason to dismiss this can find one in about 5 seconds.
But adoption is the wrong number to look at. The growth rate is very high, roughly doubling every 9 months. Run that forward, and 18 months from now, the picture is not incrementally different; it is categorically different. Most people underestimate how quickly the market gets to a point where adoption is high enough that accepting digital IDs stops being optional.
The uncomfortable part is that the integration work I described above takes longer than 18 months to do well across any meaningful footprint. So the companies deciding today that adoption is too low to bother with are not deferring a decision. They are choosing to be late.
The hill I will die on: mushroom coffee
Mushroom-based coffee substitute is the best morning drink, and it should be offered at every coffee shop. They would all make a lot of money, because if I were ever in that town, I would spend a lot of money there.
I like the slightly caffeinated ones. Much less caffeine than coffee, just a little, and you get the adaptogens, which I enjoy saying because it makes me sound fancy. It makes me feel fancy drinking it. A nice hot drink in the morning is a good thing.
Key takeaways
- Digital identity verification is shifting from document capture to credential acceptance. The question is moving from whether you can read a photo of an ID to whether you can accept the digital one already in the user’s wallet.
- Fragmentation is the permanent shape of the market, not a phase. Nearly a decade of waiting for convergence on a common digital ID standard produced more fragmentation, not less. Building for that reality is what works.
- Integration complexity is the underestimated cost. One wallet can require separate iOS and web integrations, a platform approval process, and applications in 2 portals. Multiply by 21 issuing US jurisdictions across 4 wallet ecosystems, then by every other country.
- Read the growth rate, not the adoption number. Single-digit adoption doubling roughly every 9 months compounds into a categorically different market inside 18 months, and the integration work takes longer than that.
