Verifiable credentials and ENTITY answer different layers of the trust problem
Verifiable-credential architectures are strong at packaging claims so a verifier can check issuer signatures and credential structure. ENTITY uses signed claims too, but its protocol scope also includes delegated authority, rights, evidence/provenance, governed transitions, recovery and economic state.
What a verifiable credential establishes
A valid credential can provide strong evidence that a particular issuer signed a particular claim under the credential's rules. That still leaves separate questions about whether the issuer had authority over the underlying subject matter, whether the claim remains current, whether it establishes ownership, and what downstream actions or rights are permitted.
ENTITY keeps those questions separate
| Layer | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Identity | Persistent subject/actor identity. |
| Authority | Who may perform a governed action or delegate it. |
| Right | Permissions, entitlements and governed asset/data rights. |
| Event | Signed state transitions and evidence-bearing actions. |
| Value | Explicit economic consequences and settlement lineage where applicable. |
Credential validity is not objective truth
ENTITY deliberately preserves the distinction between cryptographic verification and external-world truth. A valid issuer signature can prove attribution and integrity; it does not automatically prove that every statement in the credential is factually correct or legally dispositive.
Global Passport
ENTITY's Global Passport is a protocol surface for carrying governed identity, profiles, evidence and rights context across jurisdictions and application domains. It should not be described as equivalent to, or automatically compliant with, any particular verifiable-credential standard unless a concrete mapping and conformance claim is separately established.
Where standards can complement ENTITY
VC-style credentials, DIDs, OIDC-based authentication and other standards may be used as inputs, mappings or interoperability surfaces in deployments. ENTITY's standards mappings are intended to preserve claim boundaries rather than silently convert one external standard into sovereign ENTITY authority.
What this comparison does not claim
This page does not claim that ENTITY replaces W3C Verifiable Credentials, DIDs or related identity standards, nor that ENTITY is conformant to a standard merely because concepts can be mapped. The current standards-mapping documentation should be read as an architectural mapping unless an explicit conformance record says otherwise.
Independent review
A useful review is to find a case where an externally valid credential, issuer or mapping could incorrectly strengthen ENTITY authority, ownership or truth state. That is exactly the kind of escalation the public verification challenges ask reviewers to test.