Wallet Storage is a new feature of digital wallets that allows for storing the content of the digital wallet in a decentralized way. This allows you to back up your wallet contents in case you lose it and to share data with others by storing it and sharing a link to the storage space.
Wallet Storage is for digital wallets. But wait what are digital wallets even? According to the California State Digital ID Framework:
A digital wallet is a secure space on your electronic device that stores sensitive digital artifacts. Digital wallet interfaces vary; some are built into the native software of digital devices (such as the “wallet” on an apple or android phone), while others are housed in a mobile or web-based application. Any kind of digital wallet may play a role in the interactions that make up the Digital ID Ecosystem.
Digital wallets contain many kinds of digital artifacts (bank cards, membership cards, mobile driver's licenses, etc.), and can facilitate secure interactions with these artifacts, allowing users to pay for goods online or in-person by securely transmitting payment information, or to confirm their eligibility for a benefit or discount by presenting identity information. Digital wallets typically incorporate security functionality that ensures only the primary user may access and share what is contained inside, including by requiring passcodes, biometric verification (facial recognition or fingerprint scan), or multi-factor authentication.
Wallet Storage proposes standard mechanisms for attaching storage to digital wallets, enabling users to store and share their digital artifacts with their choice of storage provider from an ecosystem of trusted storage services. Every interaction between a wallet and the storage provider can be signed and even encrypted with keys secured by the wallet.
We should all be able to choose where our wallet data is stored and shared. A Wallet Storage standard, conformant wallets, and interoperating storage services will allow us all to verifiably share data, and enables us to use our wallets to share data access capabilities with apps and agents, which can then use those delegated capabilities to access the data from the Wallet Storage server.
This kind of storage service is a key part of the Decentralized Identifier (DID) specification and the Verifiable Credentials (VC) specification.
An example of how Wallet Storage can be used is this flow of actions
We are designing Wallet Storage by writing a specification and attempting to implement it, and we'll publish results along the way.