The EU Digital Identity Wallet is an app, backed by secure hardware that protects its keys, provided under each member state’s scheme. It holds a person’s government-issued identity data and other verified attributes, and presents selected parts of them to services under the user’s sole control.
Legal termReviewed 7 October 2026
Inside the wallet, which belongs to the user and is under their control.
Issuer
Signs credentials: a member state, university, bank or employer
Issuance
EUDI Wallet
Belongs to the user, who decides what to share
Presentation
Relying party
The service that requests and checks the data
Trust layer: who is allowed to sign, and is it still valid?
Rules: the law and technical framework behind it all
A wallet holds Person Identification Data issued by the member state, plus attestations from other authorities and private parties: a driving licence, a diploma, a professional licence, a bank account attestation. Each one is signed by whoever issued it and tied to the holder’s device.
It is not a federated login provider. There is no identity provider in the middle watching which services somebody signs into. The holder presents credentials straight to the relying party, which checks them against the issuer signature and the EU trust list.
A member state can provide a wallet directly, mandate somebody else to do it, or simply recognise one built independently. Whichever route it takes, wallets have to interoperate on common protocols, so a relying party integrates once rather than once per country. Every wallet also has to offer qualified electronic signatures to natural persons by default and free of charge, though a member state may limit that free use to non-professional purposes.
Two duties are easy to miss. Wallet application source code has to be open-source licensed. And every wallet has to give the user a dashboard listing the relying parties they have dealt with and the data exchanged, with direct routes to request erasure under GDPR Article 17 or report a relying party to a data protection authority.
Defined in
Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, Art. 5a; EUDI Wallet ARF v3.0.0
One set of protocols instead of a different eID integration per country, and signed data instead of a photo of a passport.
Authbound handles the protocols, formats, trust lists and revocation checks behind these terms. See what people build with them.
