About Trust Registries

In the EUDI-Wallet ecosystem, trust registries are critical building blocks of the Trust Infrastructure (TI). They provide the shared source of truth about who can be trusted to issue, hold, and verify verifiable credentials across the EU. Here’s a structured breakdown of their roles:

🔑 1. Establishing trust anchors

• Contain authoritative information about trusted issuers, verifiers, and wallet providers.

• Ensure that every interaction (e.g., issuing a diploma, verifying an age, signing a contract) starts from a legally and technically trustworthy entity.

🧾 2. Issuer and Verifier Registries

• Issuer registry: lists which organisations are authorised to issue certain types of credentials (e.g., universities → diplomas, tax authorities → income statements, banks → KYC).

• Verifier registry: records who is allowed to request and check certain credentials (e.g., an employer can check diplomas, but not health data).

• Both are essential for selective disclosure and purpose limitation under GDPR/eIDAS.

🛡️ 3. Supporting reliability and legal compliance

• Enforce that only entities complying with eIDAS2, AML/KYC, and sectoral regulations can participate.

• Help supervisors and regulators ensure compliance, liability allocation, and enforcement.

• Provide auditability: who issued what, who verified what, under which mandate.

🔄 4. Interoperability across Member States

• Trust registries make it possible to federate national systems into an EU-wide framework.

• Enable recognition of foreign issuers/verifiers (e.g., a Finnish diploma verifier accepting a Spanish university credential).

• Act as lookup services to check cross-border trust, reducing friction in the Single Market.

🤖 5. Enablers for automation and AI-agents

• Registries provide machine-readable trust signals (metadata, DID/URI endpoints, revocation info) so that wallets and AI-agents can instantly determine:

  • “Is this issuer trustworthy?”

  • “Does this verifier have the legal right to ask for this credential?”

• Without registries, every transaction would require bilateral trust checks → inefficiency.

📈 6. Governance & Ecosystem Scaling

• Help implement rulebooks and governance frameworks (e.g., DIIP, HAIP, ToIP).

• Allow new credential types and new players to be onboarded in a controlled, transparent way.

• Support economy of reuse → one registry entry supports many use cases.

• ✅ In short:
  Trust registries in EUDI serve as the roots of trust that make verifiable credentials safe, interoperable, and usable at scale across the EU. They answer the key questions: Who may issue? Who may verify? Under what rules? — enabling wallets, businesses, citizens, and AI-agents to rely on digital credentials confidently.