Spruce ID

Spruce ID has quietly become the technology partner powering the single most successful government digital-ID program in the United States: California's mobile driver's license, which crossed roughly 2 million issued credentials by late 2025, making California the country's leading issuer, with SpruceID supplying the cryptography, standards implementation, and verification tooling behind the DMV wallet that supports both the ISO mDL and W3C verifiable-credential formats. That reference deployment is the moat. As state after state moves on mDLs — Utah's June 2025 SB 260 mandated an optional state-endorsed digital identity, and OpenID has recommended the exact open standards (OpenID4VP, OpenID4VCI, ISO/IEC 18013-5/-7) Spruce builds against — the company sits at the center of the standards convergence rather than betting on any one proprietary wallet. Founded in 2020 by Wayne Chang and Gregory Rocco out of ConsenSys, backed by a $34M a16z-led Series A, and having worked with DHS on standards-based mobile identity, Spruce is the rare independent that governments trust precisely because it is standards-first and does not lock issuers or holders into a closed platform. If US digital identity plays out as a federated patchwork of state-issued credentials that must interoperate, the neutral open-source infrastructure layer underneath them all is a decade-long franchise with regulatory tailwinds, not a feature that a larger vendor can casually bundle away.