PDF: EUBW - Verifiable Credentials beyond Identities
Digital Wallets for Business
Decentralized Identities solves the basic problem of allowing natural persons to prove and disclose attributes of their identity. However, there exist many more legal entities than just natural persons. These are known as legal persons and corporations and organisations form key examples of these.
Similar to natural persons, such legal persons have an identity with a range of attributes and assertions associated with them which is necessary to assert towards third parties such as other businesses or governments. Enabling this is the goal of business wallets. Such wallets have the potential to greatly simplify and reduce the administrative burden for businesses to meet reporting obligations.
A technical solution
The key technique to enable such business wallets are digital signatures. In particular, similar to how a decentralized identity infrastructure, public institutions and other entities with trustworthy information about business will be able to issue signed documents attesting information about a particular business known as verifiable credentials (VCs). These will then be made available to the business entitled to them.
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What's inside?
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The European Business Wallet (EUBW)
The Europe Commission is already taking the necessary steps to realise this strong potential and has made it one of its highest priorities to ensure such business wallets at a European level. In fact, they both made it a flagship action as part of EU’s competitive compass from January 2025 and part of the EU Commission's work program. The motivation for this may be related to the reported 2 trillion euro loss in annual global economic value from lost productivity and revenue opportunities.
