Let’s face it, the NFT craze seems like an eternity ago. Remember those pixelated apes selling for millions? Now, crickets. The technology itself, the foundational principles of verifiable, decentralized ownership – that’s where the actual gold is. W 💰 And it's not in JPEGs. It's in Enterprise IAM unlocking digital identity.

NFT Tech, IAM's Practical Evolution

Think about it: NFTs promised a world where you truly owned your digital assets. The idea behind the initiative — brilliant! The execution? Well, let’s just say it was subpar. Enterprise IAM, on the other hand, takes those same core concepts—cryptographic verification, secure issuance, user control—and applies them to something far more practical: your digital identity.

Rajiv here. I've spent years knee-deep in the DeFi revolution, witnessing the potential and the pitfalls of blockchain technology. I’m here to tell you that the architecture underpinned those NFT booms can help fix today’s business identity crisis. It’s a powerful tool just waiting to be used! All these comparisons aside, when we discuss VCs, we aren’t talking about NFTs. VCs are essentially digital attestations, cryptographically secured, attesting to the claim that you hold.

The catch? Current centralized identity systems are terrible. Richard Esplin of Dock Labs hit the nail on the head at EIC 2025: extracting information from trusted systems of record is a nightmare. Acquisitions, varying business objectives, tricky integrations… It’s a recipe for nightmares and security risks.

  • Acquisitions create data silos.
  • Differing business goals lead to inconsistent data formats.
  • Complex integrations become brittle and expensive to maintain.

VCs offer a way out. Now picture a world where your employer provides you with a verifiable credential that testifies to your position and duties. And now you can use that one credential to access company resources. This prevents you from having to set up a new app-specific username and password every time. That’s the awesome potential of Enterprise IAM done right.

Digital Identity's Future Needs Critical Mass

The success of user-held reusable digital identity depends on achieving critical mass. KuppingerCole – and we’re only speaking about a globally 2.6 billion addressable population. That's a huge market. In addition to these new governs, they project that 400 million new credentials will be issued annually beginning in 2026. That suggests a linear adoption time frame of just under 6.5 years. The only way to truly reduce this timeframe is through enterprise adoption.

Consider first the technical challenge posed by the volume of “relying parties” – KuppingerCole estimates more than 143 million businesses worldwide. Each one foreshadows a widespread future as an early potential adopter of verifiable credentials. The enterprise IAM use cases create a “ripe market” that can’t be missed.

This is where the NFT analogy returns. Just like the early days of NFTs, we're facing a potential problem: wallet proliferation. The article highlights the potential for hundreds of digital wallets, leading to interoperability chaos across EU member states, US states, and private options. It’s similar to having hundreds of different cryptographic currencies, each with its own wallet that wouldn’t work with any others. Nobody wants that.

We need standardization. We need interoperability. And finally, we need enterprises to lead the way on adoption by issuing and accepting verifiable credentials at scale.

Address Fear, Unlock IAM's Potential

Yet, no one can blame the public for being wary to disclose their PII. Regulatory issues, particularly related to biometrics, are of course legitimate. That’s exactly where user control and privacy-preserving technologies need to be at play.

Esplin advocates for verifiable credentials (VCs) as a solution, using issuer signatures for trust and consent-based sharing to limit data sharing, while standardization reduces integration complexity. Police no longer need to store biometric templates in a giant database vulnerable to cybercriminals. These biometric templates can be stored by the user.

Let's talk about those biometric templates. The balance between sensors controlled by an issuer/verifier and those tethered to a digital wallet are profound. Dock Labs’ on-device biometric processing wallet, Truvera, is the future. Attack remote biometric data storage with the fury of a thousand suns.

The vision for the future of digital identity is not one where we hand over control to a bunch of central authorities. It's about empowering individuals with verifiable credentials that they can use to prove their identity, access services, and control their own data.

So, forget the crypto winter. Enterprise IAM is the true NFT spring for digital identity. Now is the moment to create a future where identity is safe, portable, and most importantly owned by the person. The technology is available, the market is poised, and the need is unquestionable. Let's make it happen.