Six axes. Two nobody in this field holds. Three we do not hold ourselves.

Almost no competitor is named on this page.

Where a comparison needs a specific rival, this page uses what that rival does — "a national identity scheme," "some of this field" — rather than a name we have not opened that company's own page to verify today. Unmeasured never means no. Collapsing the two would be the most attackable sentence on this page, so we do not write it. One row below is the exception, and it earns the exception the same way: a figure a state agency and a named vendor each published about itself, dated, with neither number treated as louder than the other.

The three we lose.

Independently reviewed security assurance

ISO 27001, SOC 2, and a commissioned code audit are three separate processes run by somebody else. Other vendors in this field hold one or more of the three. ORBIS holds none of them today, and the security page says so plainly rather than in a footnote.

Interoperability tested against other implementations

Some of this field has taken part in formal, published interoperability testing against other vendors' issuers and wallets. Nobody has run that exercise against this platform yet. Our own conformance vectors are public, but a self-published test is a smaller claim than an independent one, and we are not going to call it the same thing.

Reach with real people, today

A national identity scheme already carried by most of a country's residents exists in more than one market, and this is the axis by the widest margin. California's own Governor's office reported 1.7 million active mobile driving licences in April 2026; SpruceID, which built the state's wallet app, states 4 million issued programme-wide as of August 2026 — two different quantities, four months apart, each attributed to whoever published it rather than computed against the other. ORBIS has no deployment of that kind anywhere: no member of the public holds an ORBIS credential today.

The two nobody holds.

Proof of what a verifier kept after the check

Nobody in this field, us included, can hand you a cryptographic proof of what happened inside somebody else’s server after your credential was checked there. That is a property of a black box nobody controls from outside it, not a property any protocol grants, and no vendor’s claim changes what a black box is.

One certificate that satisfies every jurisdiction's identity law at once

Identity law is jurisdictional by construction. No vendor of this kind, us included, holds a single certification that simultaneously closes eIDAS, the patchwork of US state law, and every other regime a customer might ask about. A claim to the contrary would be claiming something the law does not currently make possible for anyone.

A compliance posture nobody can check is a leaflet.

Where we differ.

A conformance set built to fail, published for anyone to run

The cell publishes proofs that are supposed to fail, each with the mistake it exists to catch, and any verifier in any language can be pointed at them. Using our code to do it is optional; the set is the contract. Few vendors in this field publish a set built specifically to break their own claim.

What "certified" means in this field right now.

Not one of the six axes above — a seventh fact, not a seventh axis. The OpenID Foundation opened self-certification for OpenID4VP and OpenID4VCI with HAIP on 7 August 2026. As last read, the two registers together carried three organisations holding eighteen certifications between them: a protocol-testing harness, one funded identity vendor, and one open-source project. No established vendor in this field appeared on it. Neither do we — and a register that young is far too new for that absence to mean anything about anyone, including us.

Before you go any further.

Straight answers.

Does this page name the competitors it compares against?

Almost never. Every comparison uses what a rival does rather than who it is, because we have not ourselves opened every rival's current page to verify a number today, and an unverified figure attached to a real name is worse than a role description with none. The one exception above names a state agency and a vendor because both published their own dated figure about themselves — the naming rule bends only where the measurement already exists in public, not where it would be convenient.

Could an axis on this page move in our favor later?

Yes, and when it does the row moves, on the record, the same way a row moves against us when we get one wrong. That record already exists.

Is the sixth axis a certification?

No. It is a public test set, not a certificate signed by anyone else. Read literally, it proves only that the set exists and is open — nothing about who has run it and passed.