Apple launched passkey support in 2022. Google followed in 2023. Microsoft was right there with them. Three years later, passkeys are everywhere — and yet, most people still do not fully understand what they represent.
Passkeys are not just a better password. They are a fundamental shift in how we think about authentication, and they open the door to something much bigger.
What Passkeys Actually Fixed
Before passkeys, the web authentication model was broken in two ways. First, passwords are secrets that both parties need to know — the user and the server. This means the server can leak them (and servers leak them all the time). Second, passwords are phishable. A convincing login page and your password is gone.
Passkeys fix both. The private key never leaves the user's device. The server never sees a shared secret. And because the key is bound to the origin (the domain), phishing becomes exponentially harder — a passkey registered for example.com simply will not work on examp1e.com.
This is a genuine improvement. I have not typed a password on my phone in over a year, and I do not miss it.
But Passkeys Are Not the Endgame
Here is the thing. Passkeys solve authentication — proving you are the same person who registered yesterday. They do not solve identity — proving who you actually are.
When you open a bank account online, the bank does not care that you can prove "this device was used to set up a passkey yesterday." They need to know your legal name, your date of birth, your address, and that you are not on any sanctions lists. A passkey cannot provide any of that.
For that, you need verifiable credentials.
The Bridge
The interesting development is that passkeys and verifiable credentials are not competing technologies. They are complementary. The passkey is the authentication mechanism for the wallet. The verifiable credentials are the identity claims stored inside the wallet.
We have been building this bridge in our mobile wallet SDKs at AYANWORKS. The wallet uses platform passkeys (via WebAuthn) to authenticate the user locally. Verifiable credentials are stored in the wallet's secure storage. When the user needs to present a credential, the passkey authorizes the presentation.
This gives you the best of both worlds: the strong, phishing-resistant authentication of passkeys and the rich, privacy-preserving identity claims of verifiable credentials.
Where This Is Going
Over the next few years, expect to see passkeys evolve from a convenience feature into the foundation of a much broader identity layer. Apple and Google are already positioning their passkey implementations as the starting point for digital identity wallets.
The EU's eIDAS 2.0 regulation requires member states to accept EU Digital Identity Wallets by 2026. These wallets use passkeys for authentication and verifiable credentials for identity claims. The pattern is becoming regulatory standard.
Passkeys are not the destination. They are the ramp. The real journey — toward portable, user-controlled digital identity — is just getting started.
Ajay Jadhav
CTO, AYANWORKS