This three-year, $999,860 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Brown University on privacy-preserving authentication using mercurial signatures. Mercurial signatures offer an intuitive approach to anonymous credentials that does not require expertise in cryptographic commitments or zero-knowledge proofs. They allow for privacy-preserving certification chains and delegatable anonymous credentials with strong composition guarantees. This work aims to address gaps in practitioners' adoption of anonymous credentials by studying mercurial signatures, which conceptually are easier to explain than traditional approaches and immediately enable efficient privacy-preserving use cases like authentication. The research directly supports the goals of the NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070) to advance computing and information sciences through investigator-initiated projects.