Internet Identity Workshop XLI Report
Summary: IIW XLI brought 287 people together at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for three days of dynamic sessions on identity, personal agents, and the agentic internet. As always, the agenda was created live each morning, reflecting the priorities of a passionate, deeply engaged community. We also held the first Agentic Internet Workshop the day after IIW, continuing the momentum in a new direction.
Twice a year, the Internet Identity Workshop brings together one of the most engaged and forward-thinking communities in tech. In October 2025, we gathered for the 41st time at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. As always, the unconference format let the agenda emerge from the people in the room. And once again, the room was full of energy, ideas, and deep dives into the problems and promise of digital identity.
This time, we also hosted a special Agentic Internet Workshop on October 24, immediately following IIW. It followed the same unconference format, focusing on how personal agents, identity, and infrastructure come together to support agency online. That event deserves its own write-up, so I’ll cover it in a separate post.
Whether you’re working on self-sovereign identity, verifiable credentials, digital wallets, or the broader architecture of the agentic internet, IIW remains the place where serious builders and thoughtful critics come to talk, sketch, debate, and collaborate. Here’s a look at how it went.
Attendance
Internet Identity Workshop XLI (that’s 41 for those who haven’t picked up Roman numerals as a hobby) brought together 287 participants at the Computer History Museum in October 2025. That’s a slight dip from the spring’s IIW 40, which topped 300, but still a strong showing, especially in a field where the most impactful conversations often happen in smaller, focused groups.
The sustained numbers are a testament to the growing interest in decentralized identity, personal agency online, and the agentic internet. As always, the hallway track was just as rich as the sessions, and the energy was unmistakable.
Geographic Diversity
We continued to see excellent geographic representation at IIW 41, particularly from within the U.S., where California dominated as usual. Top contributing cities included San Jose (12 attendees), San Francisco (11), and Mountain View (10)—the heart of Silicon Valley is clearly still in it. We saw fewer attendees from Europe and Canada and that’s a shame. They’re doing important work and their voices are needed in the global identity conversation.
Notably, this time we saw increased participation from Central and South America, a trend we hope continues. IIW benefits tremendously from global perspectives, especially as identity challenges and solutions are shaped by local contexts. That said, Africa remains unrepresented, a gap we’d love to see filled in future workshops. If you know identity thinkers, builders, or policy folks in African countries, point them our way, we’d love to extend the conversation.
Topics and Themes
As always, the agenda at IIW was built fresh each morning, reflecting the real-time priorities and curiosities of the people in the room. Over the course of three days, that emergent structure revealed a lot about where the digital identity community is—and where it’s heading.
Agenda Wall being created on Day 2 (8x speedup)
One of the most visible throughlines was SEDI (State-Endorsed Decentralized Identity). From foundational overviews to practical demos, governance conversations, and even speculative provocations (”Is Compromising a SEDI Treasonous?”), SEDI became a focal point for discussions about infrastructure, policy, and the nature of institutional trust.
OpenID4VC also had a major presence, with sessions spanning conformance testing, server-to-server issuance, metadata schemas, and questions of organizational adoption. This wasn’t just theory—there were working demos, hackathon previews, and implementation notes throughout.
On the technical front, we saw renewed energy around:
Agent-centric architectures, including agent-to-agent authorization, trust registries, and personal AI agents.
Key management and recovery, especially via KERI, ACDC, and protocols like CoralKM.
Post-quantum resilience, with deep dives into cryptographic agility and the readiness of various stacks.
Sessions also ventured into user experience and adoption: passkey wallets, native apps, biometric credentials, and real-world policy interactions. There were thoughtful explorations of friction: what gets in the way of people using these tools? And what happens when systems designed for power users collide with human realities?
Meanwhile, the social and ethical layers of identity weren’t neglected. We heard about harms, digital fiduciaries, and the politics of age assurance and identity verification. Sessions like “The End of the Global Internet” and “Digital Identity Mad-Libs” reminded us that the stakes are not just technical, they’re societal.
Importantly, global perspectives played a growing role. From the UN’s refugee identity challenges to discussions of Germany’s EUDI wallet and OpenID in Japan, it’s clear the community is engaging with a wider set of implementation contexts and constraints.
All told, the IIW 41 agenda reflected a community in motion, technically ambitious, intellectually curious, and increasingly attuned to the human systems it hopes to serve. The book of proceedings should be out soon with more details.
This Community Still Matters
IIW 41 reminded us why this community matters. It’s not just the sessions, though those were rich and varied, but the way ideas flow between people, across disciplines, and through time. Many of the themes from this workshop—agent-based identity, governance models, ethical frameworks—have been incubating here for years. Others, like quantum resilience or national-scale deployments, are just now stepping into the spotlight.
If there was a feeling that ran through the week, it was momentum. The stack is maturing. The specs are converging. The real-world stakes are clearer than ever.
Huge thanks to everyone who convened a session, asked a hard question, or scribbled a diagram on a whiteboard. You’re why IIW works.
Mark your calendars now: IIW 42 is coming in the spring, April 28-30, 2026. Until then, keep building, keep questioning. And, maybe, even send in a few notes for that session you forgot to write up.
You can see all of Doc’s terrific photos of IIW 41 here.
Photo Credit: IIW XLI The 41st IIW from Doc Searls (CC BY 4.0)