What is a digital identity wallet?

A digital identity wallet is an application that holds your verified identity information — your name, your age threshold, your verification level — together with the cryptographic keys that let you prove those facts to services. It is called a wallet because of what it holds: credentials issued to you, which you present on your own terms.

The definition worth adding is negative: what it does not hold. A wallet full of document scans and photos is not an identity wallet — it is a risk amplifier, convenience dressed as infrastructure. The point of a real wallet is that services receive answers, while the evidence stays with you.

What it does not hold: copies of your documents waiting to be breached, a profile of your activity for someone else's analytics, or any way for a service to pull more than you approved. The catalogue of what each credential proves — and what it never reveals — is published at credentials and proofs.

• Keys. Passkeys and cryptographic keys that authenticate the wallet itself — no password exists to phish or reuse.
• Verified credentials. Signed statements produced by verification: your verified name, an over-18 result, a verification tier. Each credential proves something specific and nothing more.
• Consent records. A history of what you approved, for whom, for what purpose — and when you revoked it.
• Encrypted evidence, if any. Where evidence must exist, it is encrypted on the device before it moves anywhere.

Three verbs cover it. Presents: when a service asks a question, the wallet shows you exactly who is asking, what they want, and why — in plain language — before you approve or decline. Proves: approved answers arrive as a signature or a zero-knowledge proof, so a service can verify the claim without seeing the data behind it. Revokes: consent can be withdrawn at any time, and revocation stops future processing for that scope.

The first-run experience — what you need, what the check looks like, what each level means — is the get-started guide, and the full flow is how it works.

The word is used loosely, and the categories behave differently. A photo wallet just stores images of cards — convenient, and dangerous in exactly the way documents always were. A licence app displays a government-issued digital licence with display rules set by the issuer. A credential wallet holds signed, verifiable credentials and presents proofs — the category this service belongs to, and the one described further at what is a digital identity card.

The Identity Wallet described on this site is free, open-source software stewarded by a not-for-profit foundation — independent of government, with no app-store listings at this stage. Its service pages are the wallet section, and its honesty about current status is on open source.