DC4EU (Digital Credentials for Europe), the project testing the real-world feasibility of the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet, has now published its final strategic report, titled “Beyond DC4EU – Advancing European Digital Identity Through Trust Frameworks, Education and Social Security Pilots”. Authored by the 3CL Foundation and commissioned by the DC4EU Strategic Committee, the report draws policy recommendations for EUDI Wallet deployment from the findings of the DC4EU Scientific Committee, as well as over two years of research, market intelligence, and systematic analysis across over a hundred institutions in twenty-five countries.
The study provides comprehensive examination of the future of digital identity in Europe, and outlines the innovative approach adopted by the DC4EU project to successfully test cross-border exchange of high-assurance credentials within the critical domains of Education and Social Security. Across these pilots, DC4EU achieved 70% first-attempt success rate across twelve Member States with no prior coordination and managed to reduce times for cross-border qualification verification from weeks to seconds, proving that the EUDI Wallet ecosystem is both highly efficient and technically viable.
The pluralistic trust model: EBSI, OpenID and PKI
DC4EU’s fundamental discovery is that no single trust model can accommodate Europe’s institutional diversity. The EUDI Wallet vision can only be realised through pluralistic coexistence of the different and already established trust frameworks emerged from implementation experience, and not through predetermined design.
In particular, DC4EU suggests weaving three complementary trust infrastructures, each contributing essential capabilities:
- European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) for new public sector credentials – providing permanent verifiable records and governance frameworks across countries and sectors.
- Traditional PKI and eIDAS Trust Services for legacy credentials – continuing to anchor credentials with decades of proven reliability.
- OpenID-based protocols for federated academic settings and verification – enabling integration with eduGAIN while enforcing privacy through selective disclosure.
According to the project, respecting this complexity is fundamental to ensure institutional adoption. Together, these layers form a bridge pattern that enables high-assurance interoperability between existing models, while preserving long-running investments in both infrastructure and institutional adoption.
Integrating eduGAIN with the EUDI Wallet – an example of evolutionary transformation
Today, the eduGAIN interfederation service is well established both in Europe and globally, supporting over 80 national academic federations linked through coordinated trust frameworks, and handling millions of authentication transactions monthly. The federation is based on SAML, a mature standard that, while no longer actively developed, has been serving academic identity management for more than fifteen years.
eduGAIN’s long-standing success and widespread adoption however raise a key challenge: introducing the EUDI Wallet into the European research and education ecosystem without disrupting the federated infrastructure that underpins it. Universities worldwide made substantial investments in SAML-based systems, trained staff and built processes, and forcing eduGAIN participants to abandon SAML for entirely new protocols would have created massive disruption.
DC4EU addressed this by engineering a bridge solution, based on OpenID protocols operating at the exchange layer and translating between models. This bridge accepts verified credential presentations from EUDI Wallet holders using OIDC4VP (the OpenID for Verifiable Presentation specification), validates credentials against appropriate trust registries, extracts relevant attributes, and converts them into SAML assertions that institutions consume through existing identity management systems. This solution handles the issue invisibly for institutions, enabling progress without disruption.
“I am very pleased to see that the report recognises the need to integrate with the well-established and globally used eduGAIN identity federations. The solution proposed by DC4EU demonstrates that the EUDI wallet can work at scale by building on what already works.” – Klaas Wierenga, Chief Services Officer at GÉANT and member of the DC4EU Strategic Committee
Urgent call for action to achieve Europe’s 2026 digital identity mandate
Finally, the paper shares an urgent call for action. With less than 12 months left before the December 2026 mandate for Member States to deploy functional EUDI Wallets, the report identifies five core action pillars requiring immediate attention:
- Legal clarity
- Harmonised governance
- Sustainable funding
- Architectural operability
- Citizen trust
While the DC4EU demonstrated that the EUDI Wallet can work and its technical foundation is ready, its implementation at scale and in time for the 2026 mandate will depend on the decisions made in the coming months.
Read the full report: Beyond DC4EU – Advancing European Digital Identity Through Trust Frameworks, Education and Social Security Pilots
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