[QuinnWilton]

This is a really tough question to answer, because the answer depends on what you're using JWT for. JWT crams as much functionality into the format as possible, and most of that functionality isn't needed for most use cases. This means that offering an alternative requires knowing some context about what you need out of JWT in the first place.

That being said, for most purposes, you can do worse than using either mutual TLS or Macaroons [0]. As always with cryptography though, the devil is in the details, so for a more thorough discussion, check out @tptacek's "A Child's Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes" [1]. It's one of my favourite treatments of the topic, and discusses the tradeoffs of a few different techniques for different use-cases.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroons_(computer_science)

[1] https://latacora.micro.blog/a-childs-garden/