Erasmus+ students and universities face a paper-heavy credential process. See how EUDI Wallet-based verifiable credentials can make diploma and student-status verification instant, cross-border, and privacy-preserving.
Every year, thousands of EU students transfer from university to university via programs such as Erasmus+. Each transfer involves a paper trail of certificate verifications, enrollment confirmations, transcript requests, apostilles, and manual processing which can take many weeks to complete.
Combining the EUDI Wallet with verifiable educational credentials can create instant and cryptographically secure credential exchange. This solution can make this process instant and trustworthy for universities without removing their autonomy.
A student from Helsinki applying for a master’s program in Barcelona now undergoes a process similar to the following: Their Finnish university provides a paper or PDF version of their transcript. The Spanish university’s admissions department will need to verify its authenticity, often involving contacting the issuing institution and referencing national qualification frameworks, which can take up to several days or weeks per individual application.
But this is not only about speed. It is about trust. A PDF document can be edited. A paper document can be forged. There is no easy, standardized way in which universities can verify the credentials of a foreign applicant in real-time.
Large-scale pilots have shown that this manual process is not only cumbersome, but a fundamental barrier to mobility. The DC4EU (Digital Credentials for Europe) project which ran large-scale pilots testing digital diplomas and professional qualifications in 22 countries, reported that cross-border verification times could reduce from weeks to minutes when verifiable credentials are used.
Under the EUDI framework, educational attestations can be issued by universities or national education authorities directly into a student's wallet. The attestations are cryptographically signed credentials with some specific claims such as degree type and level, name of institution and country, date of completion, field of study, and results (grades or credits).
Any relying party can check the validity of the credential without having to contact the issuer. The verification relies on the cryptographic signature of the issuer, the status of the credential in revocation lists and the issuing organization’s presence in trusted lists according to eIDAS 2.0 regulation. This is different from simply scanning a PDF document. The credential is bound to the issuer’s key and the trust infrastructure, not just to a file format.
The new eIDAS 2.0 standard introduces various attestation categories. The most relevant ones for education are EAA and QEAA.
EAA (Electronic Attestation of Attributes): Issued by any trusted entity such as a university, professional organization, or employer. An EAA can verify current enrolment in studies, completion of a certain course, a micro-credential/short program, or participation in an exchange program. An EAA issuer does not have to be a qualified trust service provider. It operates within sectoral or national trust framework rather than the highest eIDAS qualification tier.
QEAA (Qualified Electronic Attestation of Attributes): Issued by a qualified trust service provider (QTSP). A QEAA carries the highest legal validity among the non-PID credentials and is considered equal to the paper original for legal purposes. In practice, this tier is more likely to be used for official degrees, nationally recognized qualifications and regulated professional qualifications.
In many ordinary use cases related to educational purposes (such as confirmation of student status under the Erasmus+ Program or verification of course completion), an EAA may be sufficient. However, for the purpose of cross-border recognition of degrees, QEAA or PuB-EAA (public-body EAA) models may be more relevant.
DC4EU (Digital Credentials for Europe) project is among the four first large-scale pilot projects testing EUDI Wallet prototypes in real-world environments. In Finland, Opetushallitus (the Finnish National Agency for Education) has been involved in the piloting work. The project lasted from 2023 to 2025 and covered education and social security use cases.
Key DC4EU data:
22 EU countries participated, including Finland.
99 institutions participated, backed by 43 public organizations and 49 private organizations.
Four use cases were piloted, including issuance of educational diplomas in digital format and recognition of professional qualifications.
About 2,790 real digital credentials were issued, about 930 users were onboarded and 273 survey replies were gathered from end-users.
User satisfaction was estimated at 7.1/10, 75% of the participating institutions indicated that they were willing to continue operations after the pilot completion.
Simultaneously, another pilot was conducted to assess the European Student Card (ESC) as a verifiable credential. Between September and November 2025, 13 issuers of the ESC, which include 12 higher education institutions and one national research and education network, piloted the issuance and verification of the digital ESC as a verifiable credential.
Results of the ESC pilot:
Issuance was completed by six organizations via ESC Router.
Issuance was completed by two organizations in a decentralized way.
The participants had a good experience and verified the applicability of making a digital ESC a verifiable credential.
The pilot highlighted the need for better guidance, improved verifier usability, and some work in revocation and lifecycle management.
These pilots are not merely theoretical. They have directly influenced the technical specification and business blueprint for educational credentials in production wallets.
The technical flow for cross-border recognition is relatively simple, despite the complex nature of cryptography involved.
Presentation request
The receiving university’s system sends a presentation request to indicate which credentials’ attributes are needed, for instance, “enrollment proof for the 2025-2026 academic year” or “confirmation of completed bachelor’s degree”.
User consent in the wallet
The student sees the request in their wallet, giving approval. They see who requests the information, which attributes are requested, and for what purpose.
Verifiable presentation
Once approved, the wallet sends a verifiable presentation with only the requested attributes included in the request. Selective disclosure helps to minimize the unnecessary amount of data sent.
Verification process on the receiving side
The university backend system verifies the cryptographic signature of the message, its revocation state, and issuer validity within the European Union’s trust framework. As educational credential issuers should be registered and their signatures stored in trusted registries, the receiving university doesn’t need any bilateral agreements with all possible issuing institutions.
This is the essence of the "trust over IP" approach that DC4EU and other related initiatives are testing: the institutions remain sovereign in terms of issuance, but a universal trust framework makes cross-border verification possible.
Universities can act as either credential issuers or credential verifiers in this scenario.
As a credential issuer:
Map your existing credentials to the EAA/QEAA data models.
Work with your national education agency to understand the issuance infrastructure.
Plan for integration between your student information system and the credential issuance pipeline.
As a credential verifier:
Integrate a verification capability that can accept EUDI Wallet presentations.
Update admissions workflows to accept verifiable credentials alongside traditional documents.
Define data handling policies and decide what you will store, for how long, and under what legal basis.
Authbound acts as the API/SDK layer that helps with the complexities of accepting EUDI Wallet presentations. For universities and EdTech platforms, this means that you can verify credentials without implementing complex protocols from scratch.
Authbound can specifically help with:
Accepting presentations of students’ educational credentials from their wallets
Verifying signatures, revocation and issuer trust
Requesting only the attributes needed by your workflow
Integrating verification into your admissions, mobility or HR workflows.
Note that Authbound doesn't issue government PID and or act as a qualified trust service provider. The function of Authbound is to enable companies and institutions to integrate with the EUDI Wallet system as relying parties, and in some cases as issuers using their own infrastructure.
If you are exploring the verification of student credentials in the context of student mobility, diploma verification and micro-credentials, then the first step is to define the use case and the minimum set of attributes needed. Then, you can think about how to approach it: build the integration yourself or use an integration layer like Authbound to minimize complexity and accelerate deployment.
Reach out to us at [email protected] or head on over to authbound.io to talk about your needs.
Verifiable credentials will not fix all the administrative issues in higher education. They will not eliminate the need for clear policies, recognition procedures, or human intervention where necessary.
But they will take away the vast majority of the manual, cross-border hassle that currently makes student mobility complicated. That is the real benefit of verifiable credentials for the Erasmus+ generation: not a new buzzword but an easier, more secure way of proving what you've accomplished.
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