Guide
How digital credential verification works
The Cylinder Team
Digital identity & verification
Verifying a digital credential takes four steps and a few seconds. This guide walks through each one — request, present, check, result — and shows exactly what a business does and does not receive.
Step 1 — The request
A business decides what it needs to confirm and requests exactly that credential — a licence, an age threshold, a qualification — through a hosted page, a QR code, or an embed in an existing form. The request is specific: it asks only for what the decision depends on.
Step 2 — The presentation
The person receives the request and presents the matching credential from a supported wallet or provider. With selective disclosure, they can share only the fact required, keeping everything else on the credential private.
Step 3 — The check
This is where trust is established. The credential's cryptographic signature is verified against the issuer, and its status is checked to confirm it is genuine, unaltered, and still valid. If any of those fail, the check does not pass.
Step 4 — The result
The business receives a clear outcome — pass, fail, or manual review — along with a timestamped record. That outcome can drive the next step automatically: approve an application, grant site access, or continue a checkout.
What the business receives — and what it doesn't
A verification returns the decision the workflow needs and a minimal record of it. Designed well, it does not require the business to collect or store the underlying identity documents, which keeps the data footprint small and the risk low.
Where Cylinder fits
Cylinder runs these four steps as a managed flow: you configure the check once, publish it where people already are, and read every result from one dashboard — no SDK, no custom build, and a complete audit trail by default.
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