From Sandbox to Production: EUDI Wallet Ecosystem Rollout in Germany [Intermediate]

All right, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining and for the opportunity to talk to you. So we are the second part of the German OID Wallet team presenting today. Thanks for the great presentation, Christina and also Paul. We have seen the wallet, which is pretty cool and complex, but amazing work. But now we are focusing on the ecosystem because the wallet alone is not what users, at least we think, will be convinced. And I mean, use cases are interesting, but somehow these use cases and relying parties and issuers, they need to join the ecosystem.

And in Germany, we see the ecosystem really as a public space. And of course, public-private in the sense that there are public and also private organizations interacting with each other, with the users in the ecosystem. So our talk is about how to go from sandbox to production, or what kind of products we also need to streamline this onboarding experience. So I'm Konrad, I'm a product manager, and with me is Dietmar, and he will take over.

Yeah, so here's our intro slide. Sorry for the slight delay. We were so stunned by our own wallet demo that we forgot to put on the microphones.

So yeah, let's dive in. As Konrad already said, I'm the product manager for the UDI Hub. It's a product we didn't speak much about in the past, so I want to give you a little bit of insight in what's going on there and what it is.

And yeah, we've just seen the wallet. It's an amazing product. The demo works great. And everybody's talking about the UDI project as it would be an app project. But as Konrad already pointed out, the project is actually an ecosystem project. And so with only a wallet, it will not work. We will need issuers, as we have seen, to issue data into the wallets. We need relaying parties who consume those data. And then once consumed, provide some useful service to the users. And only that will make everything successful.

And what the European Union does is much more than a national identity project here. We are trying to scale a trust ecosystem on thousands or tens of thousands of organizations. We will have multiple wallets across Europe, so at least one in every European and some more countries. And we will have hundreds or thousands of issuers issuing data into wallet. And we will maybe have tens of thousands of relaying parties then accepting those credentials. And on top of that, we hope we're going to have millions of users using the wallet.

And all of this needs all of this in different contexts and in different regulations. There are a lot of players in this field. So we already talked about there are issuers. Issuers need relaying parties to consume the wallet. They're relaying parties consuming it. Wallet users. There are service providers that are in this market or intermediaries. They're very important. They will bring people into the ecosystem and scale the ecosystem. We need trust. We need transparency. Without transparency, there will be a lot of critics towards the ecosystem.

And someone has to orchestrate this whole thing. So who will that be? In Germany, this is going to be the orchestrator. And so right now, we are standing here. Most of us, you can recognize with this black sprint pullovers.

Right now, we are sprints, but we are in the process of founding a company that will act as an orchestrator. It will take over the role as the orchestrator and has all the legal backgrounds that it needs to do that. And the orchestrator itself will kind of represent itself with this so-called UDI hub DE as a German portal for the ecosystem. And the UDI hub will operationalize basically this orchestrator role. It will have multiple areas inside that are significant and important for the ecosystem.

There will be one space, which we call the relaying party onboarding and management area, which basically enables people to come into the ecosystem. And right now, we already have a sandbox from maybe many of you know. There are also some colleagues in here, by the way, who will tomorrow explain how to onboard into this very sandbox, because today this process is manual. And so with the first iteration of the UDI hub that we're going to ship, this process becomes self-service. And this shall also be open to anyone.

So whoever wants to try how the ecosystem works, they can come to the sandbox, set up a verifier or an issue, whatever, and play with a specific wallet that is working in this environment. So of course, that's not all. The UDI hub is mainly built to bring people into the productive ecosystem. And therefore, the process will go on, bringing those companies who want to participate in the UDI ecosystem to the production. And how they would do that is that they have to verify themselves as a registered legal entity in German towards us.

And once this is done, they can create different use cases for the production environment. And now for maybe the hardcore techs, it's just one minute excursion. So what happens then? Now we are issuing basically a trust credential. So these people participate in this trust framework or trust ecosystem. So everyone in the ecosystem will get an access certificate. And in the access certificate, we basically, you who participate, that receive it, that needed to participate, will prove who you are kind of to the wallet.

Whenever, what we've just seen in the wallet demo, somebody is interacting with the wallet, the wallet will check, is this a trusted member in this ecosystem? Somebody that was kind of checked that is a legal entity by us. And on top of that, if you're consuming credentials from the ecosystems, from an issuer, from the PID provider, you have to declare what you're going to consume and what for. And this will be issued in this so-called registration certificate, that when you consume credential will also be submitted to the wallet.

And so the user and the wallet, they can basically see, if I'm sharing my data, this is actually why I'm sharing it to whom. And if maybe somebody asks for more data, that would in that moment become visible.

And yeah, we talk about visibility now. So this is all about basically making a transparent process. So you're interacting with entities you trust and you know what is going on. And this transparency also reflects in the UDI hub. In the UDI hub, we will have a section that will take over control and transparency. So basically we are planning to build dashboards and APIs. Also everybody can access that and retrieve data about who is active in this ecosystem, who is issuing data, who is consuming data in the ecosystem for which purpose or for which intent.

And of course, I want to point out, we will never see the transactions that are going on in the wallet. So all we do see is the intent that the companies have and we make that transparent to everybody. So this will be very useful for civil society or researchers, even of course for the public who is interested or regulators. Some of this data we actually have to report as well to the regulators. Did it go to sleep?

Oh no, yeah, here it is. But that's not all. The orchestrator does not only operate the infrastructure like that. We also have the responsibility to be part of growth. So the UDI hub is a big part and a very important part of the ecosystem growth strategy. And for this, we will have different areas. We are envisioning an information area where we create a momentum and communicate the ecosystem, what it does, how it works and why it's beneficial to join it.

And on top of that, we will have a lot of enablement functionality on the portal where we basically help the companies to onboard into the ecosystem and make the onboarding let's say as easy as possible. So we will provide tooling. We already have some tooling that we provide in the sandbox. All of it to make the implementation of the UDI wallet into their into their services easier. We're also planning about connecting, relaying parties with service providers and giving all sorts of guidance and help communities and developer guidance into that. So we are building the UDI hub right now.

I was talking a lot about it, what it does, but we finished a tender in April. So where we teamed up basically with a partner who is building this UDI hub with us together. And we are now in the process of ramping up the whole team, product managers, designers, developers. Now we have already a development environment and we start producing code.

Actually, it's a super exciting time for me personally. And so as we already heard from the wallet, of course, we will also have it open source. So we will have a very transparent development process. Everybody can check the code. We will join a bug bounty program. And of course, we will always try to receive user feedback from all of our different target groups. So we are already connecting to companies in the sandbox today who are trying to onboard to the ecosystem and asking them, so what are their needs? What are the problems they have with their onboarding?

So we can try to make that better and address all of their needs. But of course, it's not only relaying parties and issuers in the UDI hub, as we heard. There will be other groups like, as I said, researchers, civil society, just normal citizens, probably also a lot of designers. And so we will talk to them and interfaces them, collect their feedback and just have a modern, basically, product development cycle there. And so just to conclude, to have a successful ecosystem, it's not going to be enough to have a great wallet, which we're going to have.

What we're going to have to build is a sustainable growth and a very trusted ecosystem. And this comes together in the UDI hub. And with this, I give to Konrad.

Yes, thank you so much. And our personal goal is for next year, if we are invited again, hopefully, to, of course, demo the live production system so that we can catch up to the wallet development team, of course. So coming to the next part, because this is not the vision we are building at right now, but basically what's going to come up in the next months. But we are already running a national sandbox and you will hear more about this tomorrow by our colleagues. But what is important if you want to go from sandbox to production is the approach we have taken, which is going step by step.

I mean, this whole wallet and the whole ecosystem idea is really big. I mean, there's a lot of vision you can put into it, but it's really important for us to go step by step, ensure security, governance, and of course, the ecosystem readiness and start early tests and then basically improve and scale. So this is what we also do with the sandbox. And now I also have the clicker problem. Yes. And that's the reason why we are doing this, because it's complex. We need to test and improve and get feedback. And I think this message is pretty clear so far.

So first step, we have a new website for the project where you can also find information. There's also a newsletter you can sign up to get the latest information. There are also other materials and information. So please check this out as a first step. And of course, there's a roadmap. This roadmap is not fixed. It's basically the scope. You can see what is the focus for the next months. So as you have seen in the wallet, the focus is on the PIT and the EAs. And this is basically what we call the first stage. And there might be, of course, other functions coming up later.

This is up to the discussion. So we're also happy to get feedback if you think that QES is more important than payment authorization or vice versa. And the main focus we are doing right now is, of course, developing the national wallet, developing the OID wallet hub, and of course, to set up this orchestrator as a legal entity, which will be a government company at the end. So that's our main focus for next year. And what is coming next is basically to decide it. And we are happy to get feedback here because we really want to align this with you, the community, that we can create value.

Onboarding to the sandbox just quickly, because there is a more deep dive. And I think more interesting learnings shared tomorrow is there is a process. The sandbox is basically a program you can sign up easily, especially if you do business here in Germany, or you have partners that are doing business and are issuers and relying parties here in Germany. Please do. That's important to grow, to experience, and also to learn. And this is a quick preview. A lot of organizations already joined up. We are hoping for more, and we hope for diverse use cases.

And I think you will also get a deep dive tomorrow. So the main message here is, when you're moving from sandbox to production, that really, of course, need to develop things. And this is what we are doing incremental. We need to test this. This is the reason why we have the national sandbox. And that's also the reason why we started the sandbox before we have all the products like the OID Hub, because it's really important to interact and co-create with each other. Verify is an important trust-building mechanism, what we are doing, doing open source publishing and also the bug bounty program.

And for scaling, coming back to the first part of the presentation of Dietmar, we really see a need for an OID Hub, like a one-stop shop portal that bundles information access for relying party and also provides transparency and dashboards to enable others to join, but also to communicate the value and the activities that are happening in the ecosystem. And this is what we think is really crucial going forward, that we can kickstart growth of the German OID wallet ecosystem, but of course also in Europe and maybe also beyond. So you're part of that. What is important to us?

Give us feedback because we are still in early stages of this developing of the OID Hub. So that's really crucial. If you're not part of the sandbox, please join. And if you know others that might be interested in joining, but don't know how to do, support them. That might be also a business opportunity for you. And thank you for your attention and we are looking forward to your questions.