Field notes from building persistent educational identity
From Pilot to MVP
June 6, 2026
Earlier this year, we ran a small pilot to better understand how people interact with digital identity, not in theory, but in practice.
We worked directly with both youth and adults, gathering feedback on how identity is created, understood, and trusted.
We introduced the concept of a persistent “digital self” in education: a system where learning records follow the individual, not the institution. Participants didn’t just react to the idea, they engaged with it, many already had their own ideas about what a “digital self” could represent beyond education.
Academic identity already exists, but today it is centralized, controlled, and often out of reach for those who need it most. Records live in institutions. Access is conditional. Portability is limited. What we are building shifts that foundation.
Through decentralized identity commitments, individuals can anchor their credentials in a way that is verifiable, portable, and user-controlled and without relying on a single institution to grant or revoke access.
This pilot validated both the need and the direction. Even at a small scale, participants immediately grasped the value of having something that was theirs — persistent, structured, and independently verifiable.
Since then, we’ve built an MVP demonstrating Digital Identity Continuum (DIC) instantiation.
This is just the beginning. We are currently engaging educator providers through targeted outreach to integrate curricula into competency-based pathways that connect identity directly to learning and opportunity.
Because access to identity is access to opportunity, and when we return ownership to the individual, we begin to unlock both.