Digital identities existed. A network connecting them did not. IDunion built it.

IDunion — Decentralized Identity Network with SOWL

A company wants to verify a new employee's professional qualification. The certificate exists digitally. Yet the process still takes days, because the company's system is not connected to the system of the issuing body. The credential is there. It just is not interoperable. This is not an isolated case. It is the fundamental structure of almost every process that depends on identity information.

Every organization verifies. None shares the result.

Every organization builds its own silo. Credentials issued in system A are worthless in system B. The user starts every process from scratch. The problem is not a lack of digitization; many of these credentials have long existed digitally. The problem is a lack of interoperability.

Credentials that are not interoperable have no value, regardless of how securely they were issued.

Four partners. One architecture. And the question of who builds the foundation.

An identity network needs more than technology. It needs governance: clear rules about who may issue credentials, who verifies, and who is trusted. IDunion built this framework. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action funded the project as a showcase initiative for digital identities, not a concept paper but real-world use cases that were actually piloted.

The consortium partners covered the spectrum from government issuers to private-sector verification bodies.

esatus contributed the SOWL platform to this framework. It took on the technical connection between the participating systems: issuance, verification, and revocation of Verifiable Credentials based on open standards. Existing systems did not need to be replaced. They were connected.

Verify once. Use everywhere.

A credential issued in the network could be verified by any participant. No follow-up questions, no manual transfer, no repeated verification. That sounds obvious. It was not.

Because it required all participants to follow the same technical standards, accept the same trust framework, and open their systems accordingly. That was the actual task of IDunion. Not to build the technology that already existed. But to establish the connection that was still missing.

What remained after the project ended.

IDunion was time-limited. The network that emerged from it is not. The architecture followed the standards of the European EUDI Wallet. What was built in IDunion was not a national standalone solution. It was the preparation for an infrastructure that is coming across Europe.

SOWL has since been further developed in national pilots, EU-funded research projects, and live deployments.

The open question that IDunion raised.

IDunion showed that the technical problem is solvable. What it could not solve, because it is not a technical question, is the organizational readiness to make credentials interoperable.

Which verification results are produced in your organization today that stay in the system and are never reused? Which of these results would save other processes time and effort as credentials, if only they were interoperable?