What "Registered in the W3C DID Method Registry" Actually Means, and What It Doesn't

It means the name did:solidus is reserved and points at a published specification.

What is real, and how to confirm it without asking us

The entry is public. Fetch it:

$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w3c/did-extensions/main/methods/solidus.json
{
    "name": "solidus",
    "status": "registered",
    "verifiableDataRegistry": "Solidus Network",
    ...
    "specification": "https://github.com/solidusnetwork/did-solidus-spec/blob/v0.1.0/SPEC.md"
}

And the pull request that added it:

$ curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/w3c/did-extensions/pulls/713 | jq '{title,merged,merged_at}'
{ "title": "Register did:solidus method", "merged": true, "merged_at": "2026-07-04T16:12:59Z" }

Controls, so those 200s mean something: a made-up method name returns 404, and another real method returns 200. The specification URL in our own entry resolves, 200, about 24 kB, and a stranger can clone the repository at that tag with no credentials. We checked that, because a registry entry pointing at an unreachable spec would be worse than no entry.

That is a real, merged, independently verifiable artefact, and we are not going to undersell it. Most claims on a vendor site cannot be checked in two commands.

What the registry is actually for

Name uniqueness and discoverability. DID methods are identified by a short name, and two projects both claiming did:foo would break resolution for everybody. The registry is how a name gets reserved and how somebody else can find the specification behind it.

Count them yourself rather than trusting a number on this page:

$ curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/w3c/did-extensions/contents/methods | jq 'length'

There are hundreds. Being in a list of hundreds is not a distinction; it is a prerequisite.

What it is not, stated as flatly as we can

Not a W3C standard. did:solidus is not on the standards track. The DID Core specification is a standard; a method registered against it is not.
Not approval or endorsement. Nobody at W3C assessed whether our method is a good idea.
Not a technical review. The specification was not audited for soundness, security or privacy by the registry process.
Not conformance testing. No test suite was run against our implementation as a condition of entry.
Not a statement that the network works, is secure, or exists.

The review that does happen is editorial: is the name unique, is the specification reachable, are the contact details present, is the entry well-formed. That is genuine and it is worth passing, and it is a check on the paperwork, not on the engineering.

So the only phrasing we use is "registered in the W3C DID Method Registry." Never "a W3C standard", never "W3C-approved", never "endorsed by W3C". If you see any of those on a Solidus surface, it is wrong, and our internal documents have made that exact error.

The fact that settles it, and it cuts against us

A network that shut down in 2025 is still listed as "status": "registered" today.

$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w3c/did-extensions/main/methods/sov.json
  → 200   "status": "registered"

The registry does not track whether the network behind a method is alive. It is a name reservation and a pointer, and it keeps pointing after the thing it points at has stopped.

That applies to us identically. Our entry would survive us. So a reader should treat any registry listing, ours included, as evidence that a name was claimed and a document published, and as evidence of nothing else at all.

What actually would be evidence

A published external security audit of the implementation. We have none.
Conformance testing against a published profile, result public either way. We have not run one.
An unaffiliated party using the method in production. Zero.
Independent node operators, so resolution does not depend on us. One, us.