For people looking to skip all the drama and see how VCs work, please jump here. Assuming you already know how I got past Denial & Anger let's move on to...
Bargaining: Maybe they're just a fad.
If they're a fad, it's a(nother) fad drawing some serious bucks! VCs are closely related to the concept of digital identity and the space has exploded with startups like ID.me, Alloy & Incode drawing interest from across the globe.
Of course there's always dumb money - investment's not always a great indicator of future potential. If it was, I wouldn't be writing posts like these.
A better indication is current and future adoption. Here comes another aspect where the pandemic has turned things around, but this time for the better. A big pain point for countries has been around verifying vaccine certificates. The fact that fake test certificates are available at less than the cost of a taxi ride to a center had caused many a country to think twice before reopening their borders. The fear was that the same could happen with vaccination certificates.
Or so most countries thought. The US turned out to be much more trusting, as was pointed out in this skit and the folllowing meme around CDC cards:
(Source: https://ifunny.co/picture/me-presenting-my-covid-vaccine-card-memes-KEhrEsTZ8)
But most others including EU, India & Singapore used VCs. The EU DCCs, DIVOC certs and W3C vaccine certs issued by these and many other countries are nothing but VCs!
There's a minor difference though (they're not decentralized as VCs ideally should be) and it hasn't solved the problem of fake certificates completely. But the basic VC properties of tamper proofing, machine readability & issuer check are preserved - making this an unprecedented validation at scale for VCs!
COVID's not entirely gone, but the logical extension for tech like EU DCCs would be to support medical records beyond COVID. And then there's the metaverse trying to make all physical interactions passé. Coupled with the fact that other industries (finance, gaming) have probably taken notice of the tech and it's capabilities, it's hard to imagine VCs going away anytime soon.
So VCs might be more than a fad. But that acknowledgement merely pushed me into...