Verifying the credentials of a user is a common requirement in today’s day-to-day activities. Typically, a user proves her credential by providing a physical token (e.g., driver’s license, passport) to a verifier. This way of verifying credentials unnecessarily exposes users’ sensitive information since physical credential tokens often contain much more information than is necessary for their intended tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed framework to issue and manage digital badges to users that minimizes the scope of the information shared. A digital badge is a statement made about a user. These badges are certified and issued by a party in authority such as a governmental authority, and their release is controlled by the user. The digital badges are publicly verifiable, tamper-evident and traceable, and contain only the information that the user accepts to share. The framework is integrated into the architecture of the bciti smart city platform [2], which is currently in use by dozens of cities across North America.