Open Source Digital Identity Dataset

About this map

The Web of Trust Map is a free online database of government-affiliated decentralized identity projects from 2018 to 2023. The map includes a collection of more than 250 decentralized identity projects and 39 consortia that endorse self-sovereign identity (SSI) technology.

Since the emergence of SSI, the industry has expanded to include governments and recognized private entities. This map visualizes the players within our current scope who have been involved in the industry in various roles, such as founders, managing entities, investors, partners, or individual contributors.

The complete dataset will be published as open-source data under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license, after an initial crowdsourced quality-control phase. This license permits all commercial and non-commercial use.

The Legacy of the Web of Trust

The term "Web of Trust" was first coined by cryptography pioneer Phil Zimmermann in 1992 to refer to a world where participants slowly accumulate and co-sign keys from counterparties that they trust. Eventually, the entire internet would become a place where people knew they could operate with privacy, participants enjoyed security, and people around the world who had never met could trust each other because they would be able to discover who else attested to the authenticity of their counterparties' cryptographic keys.

The name Web of Trust is therefore fitting for this ecosystem-dataset, as it indexes projects/entities/individuals and initiatives that all have in common that what they ultimately are trying to achieve is part of what Phil Zimmerman envisioned: Creating the ability to discover the cryptographic keys representing a person, company, entity or device and in turn verifying attestations based on them.

The indexed parties and projects are attempting this using a multitude of different protocols and tech-stacks, each with its own unique set of features, security stances, downsides, and upsides.

Who we are

The Web of Trust Map is a Key State Capital project, built in collaboration with the Adrianople Group & Perenniallabs teams.

Key State Capital is a venture capital syndicate focused on investing in responsibly developed digital ID technologies. These systems are decentralized, free from single points of failure, privacy-respecting, and designed to operate with the highest possible cryptographic security and user sovereignty.

Beyond digital ID technologies, Key State Capital invests in other complementary technologies, including Zero Trust Protocols, verifiable artificial intelligence (vAI), cybersecurity, and secure communications. KSC collaborates with businesses and international organizations to advance and implement improved digital ID and Zero Trust Protocol solutions.

The Adrianople Group is a business intelligence firm specializing in data collection and visualization. Since 2020, it has focused on large-scale data collection processes that have resulted in live products. This includes the Open Zone Map (2021), Startup Cities Map (2022), and New Cities Map (2022). Additionally, the group provides services such as economic cartography, financial research, financial marketing, and onsite analysis of special jurisdictions, and has collaborated on projects across Latin America, the Caribbean, East Africa, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Methodology

This research was the first of its kind in the SSI and Decentralized Digital Identity industries, as no global database of Decentralized Identity projects existed. As a result, we did not have any pre-existing resources to draw upon.

Inclusion criteria

Tech Stack (resolves to true if A1 or A2 are true)

A1 - Uses World Wide Web (W3C) DID or Verifiable Credential (VC), Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) or Authentication Chained Data Containers (ACDC) standards
A2 - Claims to be Self-Sovereign Identity or Decentralized Identity

State Affiliation

B1 - Received funding or endorsement from government-actors or closely state-affiliated institutions.

Partners/Users

C1 - Have at least 1 well-known partner or user

Timeframe

D1 - Project announcement date is from January 1, 2018, until July 1, 2023

Codebook

Data collection for the Web of Trust began in February 2023 and concluded in February 2025. The contents, structure, and layout of the dataset are documented in the project's codebook, which outlines the research methodology used for the variables and information collected.

Download Codebook

Note: The codebook provides a high-level description of the collected data and is not intended to serve as a comprehensive or technical reference for developers but rather a conceptual overview to guide understanding of the research. For those seeking precise schema details, we recommend awaiting the forthcoming schema documentation which will be released with the data after the public beta phase concludes.

Submit new projects

Do you know of a project that should be included in this dataset? Submit a project using the form below. Our team will carefully review each submission and verify if it meets our inclusion criteria.

Submit project →

Submit general feedback

Do you have general feedback about the Web of Trust Map? UI/UX, desired features, general data quality, or anything else? Use the form below.

Submit feedback →

Credits — The Web of Trust Team

We sincerely thank everyone who contributed to the research process for Web of Trust Map in collaboration with Key State Capital and the Adrianople Group. Your commitment and intellectual curiosity regarding Self-Sovereign Identity were instrumental in helping us achieve our objectives.

Leadership

Thibault Serlet
- Director of Research
Katarina Serlet
- Strategy and Leadership
Niza González
- Project Manager

Research & Data

Diego Zúniga - Research Manager
Mariana Cantú - Senior Researcher
Fergal Hourigan - Data Science
Andy Barr - Data Science
Nicole Torres - Quality Assurance

Development

Merlin Buczek - Perenniallabs
- UI/UX development
Stefan Landrock - Landrock.io
- UI/UX design
Ivette Cano
- Product Manager
Maria Saavedra
- Map Launch

Researchers

Ryan Dixon
Olouyomi Olarewadjou
Maria Amaré
Isaac Parra
Michelle Bernier
Juan Diego Sotelo
Sara Urquizu
Belle Guerreiro

Copyrights and Acknowledgements

Note: The following section will take effect once the Web of Trust map is published. Until then, by accessing the map as an alpha-tester, you agree not to scrape, reproduce, or publish any data from the site. The map is currently restricted and not available to the public; all content is for internal use and review only. Unauthorized use of the data may result in loss of access.

All data on the Web of Trust is open data and available at no cost to the general public. The data will be published with an open data commons license for both commercial and non-commercial use.

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, including commercial.
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including commercial.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the Web of Trust Map, and indicate whether changes were made.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything that the license permits.