Credentials
A Credential on Ratel is a verifiable claim about you — your age, your affiliation with an institution, a one-time code an organizer handed out at a conference — bound to your decentralized identifier (DID) and signed by Ratel Foundation. Together, your DID and the credentials attached to it form a privacy-preserving identity wallet you can selectively disclose to Spaces, Teams, and external verifiers.
You'll reach for credentials whenever proof of something about you needs to leave your account without the underlying data leaving with it. The four most common uses today:
- Gating Spaces and Actions. A host can require an attribute (e.g. age ≥ 19, member of
@university.alpha) before letting a participant join the Space, claim a reward, or vote in a poll. Configured from the Space's Panels app. - Verifying attributes about yourself. Run KYC once and your age and gender become verifiable claims; redeem an offline code from an institution and that membership becomes a claim. Either way, the verifier sees the answer ("yes, 19+") — never the raw data.
- Signing votes and DAO proposals. Your DID is what cryptographically signs the participation that flows into a Team's DAO outcomes.
- On-chain settlement. When you claim past-cycle Tokens, the on-chain transaction is signed against your DID-linked wallet — your DID is the bridge between Ratel's off-chain Points ledger and the on-chain claim.
In this chapter
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Attribute management | The hands-on /credentials page tour — Personal Identity card, KYC + offline code verification methods, the attribute grid (Age / Gender / University / Employer / Membership), the W3C VC cryptographic proof panel, and the privacy guarantees that hold across all of it. |