Persona Credential (VPC)

A Verifiable Persona Credential links a P-DID (Persona DID) to an existing relationship. It lets you selectively reveal a persona identity — potentially a pseudonymous one — to a specific counterparty.

How It Works

The VPC is an Annotation Credential — it doesn’t create new graph structure but attaches persona information to an existing relationship. The issuer is the P-DID itself, and the subject is the counterparty’s DID.

This means: “I am revealing to you that this persona identity belongs to the same person you already have a relationship with.”

The “Banksy Maneuver”

The spec highlights a use case called the “Banksy Maneuver” — proving that you control a pseudonymous identity to a specific person, without revealing it to anyone else. For example, a developer known by their real name could prove to a trusted contact that they also control a well-known pseudonymous open-source identity, without publicly linking the two.

This is enabled by the DID separation in the DID taxonomy: your P-DID is distinct from your M-DID and R-DIDs, so linking them is a deliberate, selective act.

Relationship to Pairwise ZKPs

The Banksy Maneuver is one application of the broader pairwise ZKP construction the DTG spec defines on the VRC (§5.1). That construction lets a VRC holder selectively disclose chosen attributes — most usefully, the parties’ P-DIDs — while hiding the underlying R-DIDs that constitute the private pairwise channel. The VPC is what makes the disclosed P-DID meaningful to a counterparty as a persona link, layered on top of the cryptographic primitive provided by the pairwise ZKP. See zero-knowledge-proofs for the broader framing.

See also: zero-knowledge-proofs, did-types, credential-categories, dtg-credentials-overview