A Verifiable Claim allows one person to digitally express claims in such a way that another person can verify the claim in a distributed and (possibly) anonymous yet secured way.

So the big trick is that this can be done in a distributed way, no middleman needed that you (have to) trust and for which you pay a hefty sum.

But the biggest trick is that Verifiable Claims can be made without releasing personal information on the person about which the claims are being made.

This means that a visitor to a car rental site can claim to have a valid driver’s license and a valid insurance, and that the car rental service can then verify these claims without ever needing a third party (e.g. notary, bank…) nor even the name or the address of the person to verify these claims.

This is definitely going to become a very important and interesting topic in the months and years to come.

In a set of follow-up posts, we’ll dig deeper into how this all works…