Updated 2026-10-04: freshness band, ZadQ’s bar and expiry.
Two decisions taken in August 2026 shape what a MintID attestation means. Each follows a published standard rather than a number we picked, and the parts that are ours are named as ours.
Grades measure strength, and they follow eIDAS
A MintID credential carries an assurance grade, A1 to A4. We had to answer what each grade certifies, and we took the answer from the European framework. eIDAS, ETSI and NIST all tier identity proofing by how robust the identification was — evidence, biometric liveness, screening, supervised presence — and none of them by its age.
Europe’s framework has three tiers (eIDAS low · substantial · high). MintID has four. Rather than inventing a fourth European level, we anchor on the four-level backbone eIDAS itself is built on, ISO/IEC 29115, and we use the one step that European anti-money-laundering law inserts between a substantial identification and a qualified one: enhanced due diligence.
| Grade | What it certifies | eIDAS | ISO/IEC 29115 | Remote proofing (ETSI) · US (NIST) | AML regime |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | Identity document validated against authoritative sources; for a company, the legal entity validated at the registry | low | LoA 2 | — · IAL1 | customer due diligence |
| A2 | A1 plus possession proven with biometric liveness; for a company, a verified representative entitled to act | substantial | LoA 3 | Baseline · IAL2 | customer due diligence |
| A3 | A2 plus sanctions, PEP and adverse-media screening; for a company, beneficial owners identified and screened | substantial + EDD | LoA 3⁺ | Baseline + screening · IAL2 + EDD | enhanced due diligence |
| A4 | A3 plus qualified proofing: a high-assurance eID, the EU Digital Identity Wallet, or a qualified provider | high | LoA 4 | Extended · IAL3 | enhanced, qualified |
Two consequences worth noting. ISO’s lowest level — a self-asserted identity — sits below MintID’s floor and is out of scope: every MintID credential is backed by a real verification. And the vendor certifications that matter in Europe (ETSI TS 119 461, the standard behind qualified remote onboarding) map directly onto A2 and A4, so a certified provider slots in without a bespoke mapping exercise.
What this does not change. The protocol specification already described the four grades in these terms. The standards columns are mappings, not redefinitions, so this was recorded as an architecture decision and required no change to the frozen specification.
Freshness is a second axis, not a grade
A natural instinct is to let grades decay: a month-old verification is “better” than a year-old one. We checked eIDAS, ETSI, NIST and EU anti-money-laundering law; none of them does. eIDAS, ETSI and NIST all leave the validity of a proofing result to policy; anti-money-laundering law governs updating by risk and by events, not by the level of the original check.
So the issuer publishes age separately, next to the grade, as a band rather than a date: a date is close to unique and lets observers join records; a band is shared by many holders and gives them far less to join.
| Strength · how well we know who | Freshness · how recently |
|---|---|
| A4 — + qualified proofing | F4 — under 30 days |
| A3 — + screening | F3 — under 90 days |
| A2 — + liveness | F2 — under 180 days |
| A1 — document, no biometric | F1 — under a year |
A weak grade can be very fresh and a strong one can be old; a relying party states what it needs on both axes. For ZadQ, the first product built on MintID, the claim human-backed is defined as at least A2, with a published freshness band of F1: a policy evaluated on the issuer’s session and attestation state on the classical seller rail; the band is not a presentation predicate. Any other relying party sets its own bar on both axes.
A verification backs credentials for three to twelve months, then it expires
Once a person or company has been verified, that verification can back further attestations for a bounded period — after which the credential expires, with no grace period and no extension, and the way back is a new verification. We wanted that period to come from a standard, not from us. It does, at two layers:
- The legal envelope is the EU anti-money-laundering regulation: customer information must be updated at most every year for customers under enhanced due diligence (our A3 and A4) and at most every five years otherwise.
- Inside that envelope, the period is the protocol specification’s own default validity per grade: twelve months for A1 and A2, six for A3, three for A4 — stricter than the law, and the same for natural and legal persons. No framework distinguishes the two in update periodicity, and the company-specific facts (representative, beneficial owners) already live in the grade, not in the clock.
Expiry is not revocation. A credential expires exactly when the verification behind it does, with no grace period; only the holder’s own revocation (a withdrawal of consent) or a deliberate issuer action revokes. The rest of MintID is unchanged underneath: the grade threshold travels as a provable claim inside a zero-knowledge presentation, so a verifier receives “grade ≥ A2” and never the document, the date or the person. The freshness band is published by the issuer next to the grade and read on the classical seller rail; it is not proven.