---
id: "ruff-second-generation-vcs"
type: "article"
type_label: "Articles, press releases and opinion"
title: "Second-Generation Verifiable Credentials"
maintainer: "Timothy Ruff"
authors:
  - "Timothy Ruff"
date: null
year: null
reading_level: "practitioner"
reading_level_label: "Practitioner"
reading_level_meaning: "architects, product people and adopters who know identity systems"
evidence: "informative"
evidence_meaning: "an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite"
status: "unknown"
status_meaning: "not checked, or the page gives no date"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
  - "comparisons"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "communications"
  - "investor"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://rufftimo.medium.com/second-generation-verifiable-credentials-c225d390fe90"
source_license: null
source_license_note: "no license found on the page or its site (checked 2026-11-03); the author's copyright"
found_on: "kerisse"
kerisse_credit: true
abstract_license: "CC BY 4.0"
abstract_license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
abstract_attribution: "KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/)"
last_checked: "2026-11-02"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/ruff-second-generation-vcs/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/ruff-second-generation-vcs"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/ruff-second-generation-vcs"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/ruff-second-generation-vcs.md"
---

# Second-Generation Verifiable Credentials

An article by Timothy Ruff in the Medium sequence that followed his Web3, Web5 & SSI of September 2022, making the case for ACDC and KERI as the second generation of verifiable credentials, in place of the blockchain-based first.

Labels: reading level Practitioner; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://rufftimo.medium.com/second-generation-verifiable-credentials-c225d390fe90 (license not recorded).
The abstract is KSKB's own text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; credit KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/).
Found through KERISSE, the KERI Suite Search Engine (Kor Dwarshuis and Henk van Cann), whose dataset is the source of the documents the base indexes.