Hot Takes from FIDES & MOSIP: DID/VC Adoption, Interop Profiles, and Real-World Deployment at Scale

How do we move decentralized identity from 250 DID methods and 60+ VCDM options to real-world adoption at scale? In this DIF Hot Takes session, Harmen van der Kooij (FIDES Labs) and Vishwanath Vaidyanathan (MOSIP) explore the mechanics of VC and DID adoption—discussing how we get from markets to standards, and from flexible specifications to production deployments across 28+ countries. The conversation explores: 👉 Why interoperability profiles are crucial for breaking DID/VC fragmentation 👉 MOSIP's real-world deployments: from foundational ID to land registries in Brazil enabling rural credit loans 👉 The tension between specification flexibility and maintainable open source code 👉 Why EU Wallet's focus on OpenID4VC/mDOC is sidelining DID and VCDM adoption 👉 The "coalition of the willing": how competitive wallet providers become teammates in creating new markets 👉 Moving DIIP (Decentralized Identity Interop Profile) to Open Wallet Foundation for neutral governance 👉 The challenge of backward compatibility when building on draft specifications 👉 Why "if we don't make choices, there's no interop and no adoption" One critical insight: DIDs offer powerful functionality with service endpoints and digital autonomy—but without coordinated profiles and implementation coalitions, they risk being overwhelmed by simpler, more politically palatable alternatives. The discussion highlights the gap between technical possibility and political reality, and why organizations like MOSIP (deployed in 28+ countries) and FIDES Labs (facilitating global interoperability testing) must collaborate to ensure DID/VC technologies don't fragment into irrelevance. Topics include decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials, interoperability profiles, MOSIP, open source identity infrastructure, OpenID4VC, JSON-LD, VCDM, EU Digital Identity Wallet, and global identity deployment.