Decentralized Identity (DID), grounded in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and developed in accordance with standards promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—notably Verifiable Credentials (VCs)—has the potential to precipitate a paradigm shift in Iran’s regime governing official documentation and notarization. Notwithstanding its transformative promise, the practical deployment of this architecture encounters substantial and systemic legal impediments. Employing an analytical, comparative, and doctrinal methodology, this article first delineates and critically assesses the inherent tension between the principle of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), which constitutes the conceptual foundation of decentralized identification frameworks, and the doctrine of the state’s exclusive authority over identity verification and document authentication within the Iranian legal order. This normative conflict finds its most explicit expression in Article 1287 of the Civil Code and Article 22 of the Law on the Registration of Deeds and Real Estate.
The study’s core inquiries are directed toward the precise identification of the legal and fiqh-based constraints confronting DID and the formulation of localization strategies capable of reconciling this model with Shiite jurisprudence. The results of the combined legal and jurisprudential analysis demonstrate that, despite its notable capacity to enhance administrative efficiency and safeguard informational privacy, the DID paradigm faces fundamental obstacles arising from its incongruity with established standards of evidentiary authority (ḥujjiyyat) and formal authentication (tawthīq) in Shiite fiqh, as well as with the statute-driven architecture of Iran’s system of official instruments. These challenges include the absence of clear judicial probative value, uncertainty in the allocation of civil liability—particularly in scenarios involving fault or negligence in the custody of private cryptographic keys, in light of Article 1 of the Civil Liability Act of 1960 and the fiqh doctrines of itlāf (direct causation of harm) and tasbīb (indirect causation)—and the strategic risk associated with reliance on foreign technological infrastructures in the context of international sanctions, contrary to the constitutional imperative of preserving national independence enshrined in Article 152 of the Constitution.
A comparative examination of established international practices, including the European Union’s framework for electronic identification and trust services and Estonia’s e-Residency system, underscores the feasibility of contextual adaptation through the development of hybrid governance models that retain the involvement of public authorities in the initial attestation of identity. On this basis, the article advances a set of policy and legislative recommendations, namely: revising the Registration Law to formally recognize an “official decentralized signature,” instituting a regulatory sandbox to enable controlled experimentation, enhancing judicial literacy in digital identity and blockchain-based evidence, and investing in the creation of a sovereign national blockchain infrastructure.