About EUDI in relation to DID - and DIIP

1. Governance First, Tech Second

• The EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI) is based on regulated trust frameworks: Member States, Qualified Trust Service Providers (QTSPs), and regulated conformity assessment bodies.

• DIDs, by design, are decentralized identifiers without a single root of trust. The EU didn’t want identifiers that anyone could spin up without governance. Instead, EUDI builds on eIDAS 2.0 and a legal trust infrastructure.

2. Traceability & Accountability

• EU policy requires clear accountability chains. For example:

  • Who issued a credential?

  • Who is the wallet provider?

  • Who can revoke or suspend trust?

• With DIDs, control is often anchored in cryptographic keys, but governance and liability are less clear.

• The EU wanted auditable, accountable, and revocable identifiers, aligned with AML/KYC and GDPR.

3. Avoiding Fragmentation

• DIDs are not standardized across ecosystems. Multiple DID methods exist (did:web, did:ion, did:key, etc.), with different trust anchors and resolution methods.

• This risks interoperability issues in a Single Market project where all 27 Member States must work seamlessly.

• Instead, the EU opted for a common Trust List and Registry approach, building on the successful eIDAS “Trusted List” of QTSPs.

4. Practical Interop vs. Ideological Decentralization

• EUDI is not anti-DID—it just doesn’t rely on them. The EU relies on Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and W3C standards (JSON-LD, JWT).

• DIDs could still be used inside the system (e.g., wallets supporting DIDComm for messaging), but the trust anchor is always the regulated EU Trust Infrastructure—not an unregulated DID registry.

5. Future Flexibility

• The EU approach is more cautious: get wallets running first under a regulated model, then maybe later allow DIDs for certain cross-border or private-sector use cases.

• Some pilot projects (e.g., EBSI, Findynet, IDunion) do experiment with DIDs, but EUDI core regulation doesn’t mandate them.

✅ Summary:
The EU avoided DIDs in EUDI because it prioritised governed trust lists, accountability, and legal compliance over decentralized identifiers. DID technology may still play a role, but it isn’t the foundation—the legal trust model is.