How do the eIDAS 2.0 large-scale pilots work in practice?

The eIDAS 2.0 large-scale pilots were real-world testing programmes funded by the European Commission that put the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet through its paces across a range of everyday use cases, countries, and sectors. Four major pilot consortia ran from April 2023 to 2025, collecting feedback that directly shaped the technical specifications and deployment guidelines every organisation will eventually need to follow. A second wave of pilots launched in 2025 and is continuing that work. The sections below answer the most common questions about how these pilots worked and what they mean for your organisation.

Which large-scale pilots ran under eIDAS 2.0?

Four large-scale pilot (LSP) projects ran under eIDAS 2.0 from April 2023 to 2025, each funded through the European Commission’s DIGITAL Europe Programme. The four consortia were POTENTIAL, EWC (European Wallet Consortium), DC4EU, and NOBID. Together they covered more than 25 EU Member States and brought together governments, banks, universities, healthcare providers, and technology companies to test the EUDI Wallet in genuine, cross-border situations.

Each consortium had a distinct focus area. POTENTIAL concentrated on government services, opening a bank account, SIM registration, mobile driving licence, remote qualified signatures, and e-prescriptions. EWC focused on Digital Travel Credentials, payments, and organisational digital identity. DC4EU targeted education and social security. NOBID, a Nordic-Baltic group that also included Italy and Germany, was dedicated to payment use cases, testing how the EUDI Wallet could be used to verify identity when initiating domestic and cross-border payments.

All four pilots worked from the same technical foundation: the Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF), which provides the technical elaboration of the common requirements set out in the implementing acts that wallet solutions across Europe must meet. The feedback gathered by the pilots fed directly back into refining those specifications, making the pilots as much a standards-development exercise as a product test.

A second wave of pilots launched in 2025. WE BUILD focuses on business wallets and payments, while APTITUDE covers travel, ticketing, vehicle registration, and payments.

What use cases did the pilots actually test?

The eIDAS 2.0 pilots tested a wide range of real-life scenarios where people need to prove who they are or share verified information securely. The use cases spanned both public and private sector interactions, and many involved cross-border situations where a citizen from one Member State needs to be recognised in another.

Some of the most prominent use cases that were tested include:

• Mobile driving licence: Presenting a digital driving licence during a roadside check or when renting a vehicle online
• Education credentials: Sharing verified diplomas, degrees, and certificates when applying for jobs or further study
• Payments: Verifying identity when initiating an online payment, reducing fraud without adding friction
• Digital Travel Credentials: Presenting passport or visa information at airport security and border crossings, piloted but not yet operational as standard functionality
• E-prescriptions: Sharing prescription details with a pharmacy to initiate the dispensing of medication
• Social security access: Accessing benefits and storing documents such as the European Health Insurance Card
• Organisational identity: Proving that an individual is a legitimate representative of a company
• Remote qualified signatures: Creating qualified electronic signatures to sign contracts without paper

These use cases were not chosen at random. They represent the interactions that citizens and businesses encounter most frequently, and where fragmented or insecure identity verification causes the most friction. By testing them under real conditions, the pilots generated the kind of evidence that regulators and standards bodies need to make the final technical specifications practical and robust.

How does a user interact with the EUDI Wallet during a pilot?

In the pilots, a user interacted with the EUDI Wallet through a smartphone application that stores verified digital documents and allows the user to share specific attributes with a requesting party. The experience is designed to be straightforward: the user receives a request, reviews exactly what information is being asked for, and approves or declines the share with a single action.

Here is how a typical pilot interaction worked in practice:

1. Wallet setup: The user downloads a wallet app provided by a participating Member State or an officially recognised private provider and completes an identity verification process to link their national identity to the wallet.
2. Credential issuance: Verified documents, such as a driving licence or university diploma, are issued into the wallet by a trusted source such as a government authority or educational institution.
3. Presentation request: A relying party, for example an employer, a bank, or a border control system, sends a request for specific attributes.
4. Selective disclosure: The user sees exactly which data points are being requested and chooses to share only what is necessary, for example confirming they are over 18 without revealing their exact date of birth.
5. Verification: The relying party receives tamper-evident, cryptographically verifiable data. Verification involves checking the issuer’s signature against the relevant national trusted list, checking the revocation status of the attestation using the issuer’s status information, and checking the wallet unit attestation to confirm that the presenting wallet runs on a certified wallet solution. Only the first of these checks can be performed fully offline.

The selective disclosure model is one of the most important privacy features of the EUDI Wallet. A physical passport or ID card reveals far more information than is often needed, while the wallet lets users share the minimum necessary. This reduces the risk of personal profiling and gives users genuine control over their own data. Each request is approved individually by the user; this approval is distinct from consent as a legal basis under the GDPR, for which the relying party must have its own lawful ground for processing.

Who is responsible for running and governing the pilots?

The large-scale pilots are funded and overseen by the European Commission through the DIGITAL Europe Programme, but the day-to-day running was managed by the pilot consortia themselves. Each consortium was led by a coordinating organisation and included a mix of public bodies, private companies, and research institutions from multiple Member States.

Governance of the broader EUDI Wallet ecosystem is a shared responsibility across several layers. The European Commission manages the legal framework and adopts the implementing acts that contain the legally binding requirements. EU Member States provide or mandate wallet solutions, certify and notify them, and supervise actors within their own jurisdictions. The European Digital Identity Cooperation Group supports cooperation and cross-border alignment between Member States. National competent authorities and registrars carry out oversight and registration functions at the national level, while wallet providers, issuers of Person Identification Data and attestations, qualified trust service providers, and relying parties each hold distinct roles and responsibilities within the ecosystem. No single central European authority operationally manages all EUDI Wallets.

Within the pilots, the Commission monitored progress, collected findings, and used them to refine the Architecture and Reference Framework. At the consortium level, members collaborated on technical implementation, user testing, and reporting. At the national level, participating Member States contributed their own identity infrastructure and regulatory context to ensure the pilots reflected real deployment conditions.

The Commission also provides a reference implementation of the EUDI Wallet, an open-source prototype that serves as a testing ground for the technical specifications. This prototype is publicly available, which means Member States and private parties can build on it when developing their own wallet solutions. The open-source approach lowers the barrier to participation and ensures that the standards developed through the pilots are accessible to everyone who needs to implement them.

What do the pilot results mean for organisations preparing for eIDAS 2.0?

The pilot results are directly shaping the final technical and regulatory requirements that all organisations will need to meet under eIDAS 2.0, which amends Regulation (EU) 910/2014 through Regulation (EU) 2024/1183. For businesses and public sector bodies that will act as relying parties, meaning organisations that request and verify identity data from EUDI Wallets, the pilot findings are the clearest signal available about what real-world implementation looks like.

Several practical implications stand out for organisations that are starting to prepare:

• Technical integration: The pilots confirm that relying parties need to build or adapt systems to send standardised presentation requests and process verifiable responses. This differs from traditional identity verification flows. Under CIR (EU) 2025/848, adopted on 6 May 2025, a relying party must register with the national authority of its Member State of establishment before requesting wallet data, and must register per intended use which attributes and attestations it will request. The wallet checks requests against this registered scope.
• Sector-specific requirements: Use cases in finance, healthcare, and government each carry their own regulatory overlay. The pilots are generating sector-specific findings that organisations in those industries should monitor closely.
• User experience expectations: Pilot feedback consistently highlights that users expect fast, low-friction interactions. Organisations that design over-reaching data requests will see drop-off, and the registered attribute scope provides a structural check on this.
• Cross-border readiness: The pilots demonstrate that a certified wallet from one Member State is designed to be usable with an appropriate relying party in another Member State. This does not mean that every use case will immediately be available in every Member State, that national registration requirements disappear, or that sector-specific legislation ceases to apply. Organisations operating across borders need to plan for interoperability at the European level while accounting for requirements that remain national or sector-specific.

24 December 2026 is the legal deadline by which Member States must make a notified EUDI Wallet available and public sector bodies must accept notified wallets for online services requiring electronic identification. A separate obligation under Article 5f applies from 24 December 2027 to relevant regulated private sectors where strong user authentication is legally or contractually required, including financial services, healthcare, telecoms, energy, transport, education, social security, drinking water, postal services, digital infrastructure, and digital services. Very large online platforms fall under a separate provision of Article 5f and must accept the wallet where the platform requires user authentication, on the user’s voluntary request and for the minimum necessary data. Micro and small enterprises, defined as organisations with fewer than 50 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than 10 million euros, are exempt from the private sector obligation.

These deadlines are legal end dates, not predicted launch dates. Practical interoperability and national rollout are expected to develop in phases. Organisations should not wait before beginning their preparations. The pilot results provide enough clarity now to start assessing gaps, defining integration requirements, and building internal knowledge.

For organisations in sectors such as financial services, government, and healthcare, identity verification sits at the core of their operations, which makes early preparation particularly important.

How TrustTech helps organisations connect to the EUDI Wallet ecosystem

The ID Connector is an integration that lets relying parties accept every certified European wallet, whatever Member State issued it, for identification, login and qualified signing. EUDI Wallet acceptance comes first; the same interface also carries other IDs, such as national eIDs, bank IDs and identity documents, inside and outside the EU.

Here is what the ID Connector does in the context of eIDAS 2.0 pilot outcomes and the requirements now taking shape:

• Wallet acceptance: The ID Connector handles presentation requests in line with the registered attribute scope, so relying parties request only what they have registered under CIR (EU) 2025/848.
• Trust management and verification: The Connector verifies issuer signatures against the relevant national trusted lists, which are brought together in the EU List of Trusted Lists, checks revocation status using the issuer’s status information, and validates wallet unit attestations to confirm the presenting wallet runs on a certified wallet solution.
• Reusable verified identity: Once a user has been identified through the wallet, that verified data can be reused across services, reducing repeated checks without compromising the integrity of the verification.
• Qualified signing: The ID Connector connects to a qualified trust service provider for qualified electronic signatures, creating a complete, tamper-evident record for contracts, consents, and approvals.
• Cross-sector interoperability: The infrastructure is designed to work across financial services, government, healthcare, and other regulated sectors, aligned with the specifications emerging from the ARF and the implementing acts.
• Compliance by design: Every service is built around GDPR, eIDAS 2.0, and sector-specific regulatory requirements from the outset.

TrustTech sits between the parties that need to interact, providing trusted infrastructure without owning any of them. Ready to connect? Get in touch with TrustTech to discuss how your organisation can integrate with the EUDI Wallet ecosystem ahead of the 24 December 2026 deadline.