Should digital ID wallets enforce payments?

Added: 2026-04-30

[00:00:00]is the European Union digital identity architecture reference framework is solidified, I see a lot more emphasis on how to attach payment models. And it sounds like the way they're going to do that is to ask the wallet to enforce that the verifier, the relying party, has paid for the credentials, the required payment. That's an interesting use case. I guess they can do that because they've moved away from >> [music] >> true decentralized identity identity key management using W3C DIDs. They've moved towards uh X.509 certificates and a centralized database, a centralized repository. And they've also they're also going to require wallets to be certified before they can be used for identity use cases under EUDI. So, when you have those two pre-requisites fulfilled, then I guess you can trust the wallet to enforce payment. But, that seems to me like a fairly [music] weak guarantee. I'm nervous. Our customers wanted a very strong guarantee that only people that have paid can verify a credential. [music] And that's why we require the relying party to go to the ecosystem and show ecosystem membership before they can check either the credential uh signature or the revocation status. I think that gives a stronger guarantee. I also think it's more flexible because it allows you to swap out wallets. You're you're not tied to our wallet specifically. And it allows you to change vendors so long as they all know the protocol to go back to the ecosystem. When you have state control of an ecosystem to enforce registration, then the EUDI approach will probably work in practice. So, it'll be interesting to see that at scale, and I can see why that'll be useful for open ecosystems. But, our scenarios where we want to help people with their closed ecosystems or their custom ecosystems within an organization or a partner ecosystem, I think our approach is going to meet those needs better in a more flexible way.