Spruce
Decentralized identity and verifiable credential infrastructure
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About Spruce
Spruce is a digital identity protocol company focused on user-controlled identity and verifiable credentials. Its core business includes open-source tools like DIDKit for issuing and verifying credentials, and Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE) for wallet-based authentication. The company also offers commercial services to help governments and enterprises deploy these systems.
Its core value proposition is shifting from platform-controlled identity to user-held data. Instead of relying on centralized databases, users store credentials locally and share them selectively. This reduces data silos, lowers fraud risk, and improves privacy. The market pain point is clear: traditional identity systems are fragmented, require repeated verification, and expose users to data breaches. Spruce solves this by enabling interoperable, standards-based credentials that work across organizations.
In the past six months (February to August 2026), Spruce has continued to refine its open-source libraries, focusing on interoperability with W3C standards and improving the developer experience for SIWE. The company has also expanded its government-focused solutions, emphasizing secure credential issuance and verification for public services. While no major product launches were announced, the steady updates to its GitHub repositories indicate ongoing maintenance and incremental improvements rather than radical pivots.
Spruce's journey began with a $7.5M seed round led by Ethereal Ventures and Electric Capital, enabling the team to build open-source identity toolkits. In early 2022, Spruce completed a Trail of Bits security audit covering its entire software supply chain, a critical milestone for trust in decentralized identity. The company actively contributed to the Sign-In with Ethereum (EIP-4361) standard, collaborating with the Ethereum Foundation and ENS to create an open login specification. Spruce launched SSX (Sign-In with Ethereum + SIWE + X) as a modular developer library, reducing integration code by up to 80% and adding features like session keys and data vaults. Kepler, a decentralized storage solution, was introduced with a Rust SDK and WASM bindings, enabling private data sharing via Web3 wallets. The company also developed Credible, a whitelabel mobile app for credential lifecycle management, and Tezos Profiles, which surpassed 21,000 deployed profiles to prevent NFT fraud. These milestones established Spruce as a key architect of user-controlled identity and data standards.
During the period, SpruceID made key progress in AI agent identity and verifiable credentials. It submitted formal comments to NIST NCCoE on AI agent identity and authorization, advocating that agents possess independent cryptographic identity with capability-based authorization, separating persistent identity from ephemeral task-scoped capabilities, building zero-trust boundaries, and recommending formally verifiable policy languages like CedarLang/WASM plus continuous monitoring; it also proposed a demonstration architecture comparing OAuth delegation with credential-based capability models . With NIST NCCoE, it completed an mDL practice guide showing mobile driver's licenses for account opening, phishing-resistant authenticator enrollment, and step-up verification for high-risk transactions, indicating verifiable credentials have entered real deployment . The company stressed that digital identity is becoming policy infrastructure, requiring privacy preservation, data minimization, interoperability, revocable authorization, and nondigital pathways . Future focus: adapt standards including mDL/mdoc, W3C VC, DID, SD-JWT, OID4VP/ISO 18013-7 for agent-native identity and authorization, establish interoperable trust frameworks, and move from demonstrations to scaled implementation .
Wayne Chang (Co-founder & CEO): Previously founded SpruceID, led product and engineering at ConsenSys, and served as Head of Token Engineering. He is a W3C Verifiable Credentials Working Group chair. Gregory Rocco (Co-founder): Co-founded SpruceID with Wayne, bringing expertise in decentralized identity and enterprise solutions. No other core executives were confirmed from reliable sources.