The IDUE Wallet: Current Status in Spain

In December 2025, at the EUDI Wallet Launchpad held in Brussels, one thing became clear: Spain is not late to the deployment of the European Digital Identity Wallet. It is among the first five countries. Together with France, Italy, Denmark and Greece, Spain presented the IDUE Wallet (the national name for the EUDI Wallet) as the most advanced pilot project in terms of technical architecture, functional use cases and potential user base. EADTrust attended this event as part of the ecosystem. What follows is a description of what is available and what is still missing, without embellishment.

Concepts for Understanding the IDUE Wallet

Cl@ve

The Spanish public administration’s digital identification system, with 24 million registered users. It acts as the underlying infrastructure for the adoption of the IDUE Wallet, providing an existing user base already familiar with electronic identification before public authorities.

ARF (Architecture Reference Framework)

The reference architecture framework defined by the European Commission as the technical basis for all national implementations of the EUDI Wallet. It guarantees cross-border interoperability between the different national implementations.

OpenID4VP (OpenID for Verifiable Presentations)

The communication protocol used to present wallet credentials online. It allows citizens to present their attributes securely and verifiably to a verifier over the internet.

ISO/IEC 18013-5

The international standard for presenting credentials in proximity mode, offline and face to face. It is the same standard used by the digital driving licence. It allows identity verification in offline mode.

SD-JWT VC (Selective Disclosure JWT Verifiable Credentials)

A verifiable credential format that enables the selective disclosure of attributes. It is one of the two standard formats defined in the European implementing acts for the EUDI Wallet, together with the ISO/IEC 18013-5 mdoc/mDL format.

EUDI Wallet Launchpad

An event held in Brussels in December 2025 where the EUDI Wallet pilot countries presented the status of their national implementations to the European Commission and the ecosystem of participants involved in the project.

What the IDUE Wallet Is

The IDUE Wallet is the Spanish implementation of the EUDI Wallet regulated by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183. Its name is the reverse acronym of EU Digital Identity, a naming choice that maintains an explicit connection with the European standard of which it forms part. It is not a parallel national project: it is the Spanish instance of a system that will operate interoperably across all 27 Member States.

The IDUE Wallet has an unusually strong starting point compared with most European countries: 24 million users already have an active account with Cl@ve, the Spanish public administration’s digital identification system that acts as the underlying infrastructure. This existing user base is a genuine advantage in the adoption process: Spain is not starting from scratch.

The FNMT (Spanish Mint) acts as the PID (Person Identification Data) issuer in the pilot environment. It is the body that certifies that the identity data contained in the wallet corresponds to a real person verified by the Spanish State.

What Already Works: Operational Use Cases in the Pilot

The Spanish pilot is not a static demo. There are use cases that already work in production, with real citizens, in controlled environments. The two most advanced are:

Identification with PID

Citizens can identify themselves to services using only the PID in their wallet, without needing to present a physical identity card or use a traditional digital certificate. The process works online and, in certain contexts, offline through the ISO/IEC 18013-5 protocol, the same standard used by the digital driving licence. Identity is transmitted verifiably between the citizen’s device and the verifier’s system without EADTrust or any other intermediary having access to the content.

Age Verification

This is the use case that best illustrates the power of selective disclosure. Citizens can prove that they are over eighteen without revealing their name, date of birth or any other information. The system only receives the Boolean confirmation “over 18: yes”. Nothing else. For platforms selling alcohol, tobacco, gambling services or adult content, this mechanism fulfils the legal age verification obligation with the minimum possible impact on user privacy.

Beyond these two central use cases, the Spanish pilot is working on integrating verifiable academic diploma credentials with universities and professional attributes with professional associations. These use cases are the most complex from an issuance perspective and the most transformative in terms of their value to citizens.

The IDUE Wallet Architecture: Four Participants, One Chain

The IDUE Wallet is built around four participants that interact within a regulated trust ecosystem. Understanding how they relate to each other is essential for any organisation wishing to participate in it.

Citizens and Their Wallets

The natural person who has the IDUE Wallet app installed on their mobile device. They store their credentials, decide what to share, with whom and when, and have complete control over their transaction history. The wallet belongs to them: nobody can access it without their explicit consent.

Credential Issuers

The organisations that issue the credentials citizens store in their wallets. There are two types: public authorities (the State, registries and public administrations), which issue the PID and PubEAAs; and QTSPs (such as EADTrust), which issue QEAAs (qualified electronic attestations of attributes). Only QTSPs can issue QEAAs with full legal value under eIDAS 2.

Verifiers

Public or private organisations that receive the credentials presented by citizens to verify their identity or attributes. A bank that wants to verify the identity of a new customer, a hospital that wants to confirm a doctor’s professional registration, or a company that wants to verify its representative’s powers of representation. To become a verifier, an organisation must be registered as a relying party in the national system and have the corresponding access certificate.

The Directory and the Registry

The trust infrastructure that certifies who can do what within the ecosystem: which organisations are authorised to issue credentials, which can verify them and under what conditions. In Spain, EADTrust is building the Directory of Informed and Informing Parties (available at usercentric.id), which acts as the guidance and connection layer for organisations seeking to join the ecosystem as issuers or verifiers.

The Supporting Technical Standard: ARF and OpenID4VC

The IDUE Wallet is not an application with its own architecture: it follows the Architecture Reference Framework (ARF) defined by the European Commission as the technical reference framework for all EUDI Wallet implementations. This guarantees interoperability: the IDUE Wallet works with verifiers in France, Germany or Estonia in the same way as it does with verifiers in Spain.

The communication protocols between the wallet and verifiers are based on OpenID4VP (OpenID for Verifiable Presentations) for presenting credentials online, and ISO/IEC 18013-5 for presenting credentials in proximity mode, face to face and without an internet connection. These are the same protocols used for digital driving licences in the US and in numerous advanced digital identity projects around the world. Spain has adopted them since the beginning of the pilot.

Credentials are issued in SD-JWT VC (Selective Disclosure JWT Verifiable Credentials) and ISO/IEC 18013-5 mdoc/mDL formats. These are the formats defined in the European implementing acts as mandatory standards for cross-border interoperability.

What Is Still Missing: The Real Risks of the Spanish Implementation

An honest assessment of the current situation must also identify what remains unresolved. The pilot is solid, the starting point is strong and the political commitment is clear. However, some elements are still pending and affect how quickly organisations seeking integration can prepare.

The Complete National Roadmap

At the time of writing this article, Spain has not published a detailed roadmap setting out the specific deadlines for extending the IDUE Wallet beyond the pilot programmes. This creates uncertainty for organisations that need to plan their integrations. The experience of countries that have published roadmaps, such as Germany and the Netherlands, shows that doing so significantly accelerates adoption within the private ecosystem.

The Proliferation of Non-Qualified Participants

One of the risks identified in EADTrust’s strategic content report is the emergence of attribute issuers operating without the required qualified status, including professional associations, registries and private platforms that issue credentials without supervision. This creates a fragmented ecosystem in which not every credential in circulation offers the same level of assurance. The distinction between a QEAA issued by a QTSP and an EAA issued by any other participant is essential for trust in the system.

Dependence on Pending Implementing Acts

Some of the technical implementing acts under eIDAS 2 are still under development or public consultation. This creates technical grey areas in which organisations cannot finalise their integration architecture until the standards have been fully established.

Training the Private Ecosystem

Verifiers will not appear by themselves. Companies in the regulated private sector need to understand what it means to integrate as a relying party, which certificates they need, how registration works and which user flows will change. Training the private ecosystem will be the most intensive work over the next twelve months.

EADTrust’s Role in the Spanish Implementation

EADTrust is not an observer of the IDUE Wallet deployment process. It is one of its builders. As a QTSP registered in Spain since 2014, supervised by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation and included in the European Commission’s Trust Service List, we form part of the trust infrastructure the ecosystem needs to operate.

Within the IDUE Wallet ecosystem, QTSPs have a role that no other participant can perform: only QTSPs can issue QEAAs, the qualified electronic attestations of attributes with full legal value throughout the European Union. If a university wants to issue verifiable diplomas with European legal value, it needs a QTSP behind it. If a bar association wants to issue professional membership status as a verifiable credential, it needs a QTSP behind it. If a company wants to issue verifiable powers of representation for its employees, it needs a QTSP behind it.

EADTrust can be that QTSP. We are already building the first QEAAs within the framework of the Spanish pilots. In addition, the Directory of Informed and Informing Parties at usercentric.id is the platform that connects organisations seeking to join the ecosystem with the technical, legal and operational information they need to do so correctly. It is not a passive directory: it is an active instrument for developing the private ecosystem around the IDUE Wallet.

Frequently Asked Questions About the IDUE Wallet

The Private Ecosystem Around the IDUE Wallet Still Needs to Be Built

The IDUE Wallet app will be the most visible part of the system. But its real value for citizens and businesses depends on the ecosystem built around it: credential issuers that issue attributes with real value, verifiers that accept them with confidence, and technical standards that ensure everything works correctly across all 27 Member States.

This private ecosystem will not build itself. It will be built by organisations that decide to participate, with enough information to do so correctly and enough time to integrate without rushing.

EADTrust is building this ecosystem. The directory at usercentric.id is the first step. QTSP services for issuing QEAAs are the next. Technical and regulatory support for organisations wishing to join as verifiers completes the offering.