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Blockchain

Why does showing my mental-health credential reveal which clinic issued it?

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Opportunity

Selective disclosure lets you share a single attribute without exposing your other data, but it cannot hide which institution signed the credential. A presentation from a credential issued by a psychiatric facility, an HIV clinic, or a criminal court tells the verifier something sensitive before a single attribute is shared. The EU Digital Identity Wallet Architecture and Reference Framework mandates issuer-hiding, but a June 2026 technical audit of the wallet finds no deployed mechanism that achieves it. Solutions in the research literature, anonymous credential schemes, issuer-set membership proofs, are incompatible with the SD-JWT and mdoc formats already locked in as the wallet defaults. Every sensitive-domain deployment today ships on a standard that leaks the one thing it was supposed to protect.

Why it matters

Issuer-hiding is the missing layer that makes selective disclosure usable in exactly the domains where privacy matters most.

How I score the opportunity

The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.

Severity9/10

How much pain it causes when it shows up.

Frequency7/10

How often people actually run into it.

Whitespace9/10

How little good tooling exists for it today.

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