Standards
ISO/IEC 18013-5 (mDL)
Also known as: mDL, ISO mDL, mobile driving licence
The ISO standard for mobile driver's licenses — the mDL format EUDI Wallet and most government digital-ID programs support.
ISO/IEC 18013-5 is the international standard for mobile driver's licenses (mDLs). It defines how a mobile device can hold and present a driver's license such that a verifier (police officer, bartender, airport gate agent) can check it cryptographically — without the holder surrendering the phone or displaying full information to unaffiliated third parties.
The mDL standard is a cousin of W3C VCs rather than a drop-in alternative. It uses CBOR encoding rather than JSON-LD, COSE signatures rather than JOSE, and a device-retrieval protocol (NFC or BLE) rather than a wallet-to-browser protocol. But conceptually it's the same problem: a credential that the holder presents, the verifier checks, with selective disclosure by default.
The EUDI Wallet supports both W3C VCs and mDLs. LearnCoin's interest in mDL is more academic than tactical — academic credentials don't typically require the in-person, physical-presence presentation flow mDL was designed for. But the standards convergence between mDL and W3C VC via the IETF OpenID4VC suite is worth tracking.
Related terms