Building Europe’s Future of Digital Trust and Data Sovereignty

As privacy concerns rise, Europe accelerates its architecture for secure identity, data exchange and sovereignty-based digital services

• Europe is entering a new phase of digital transformation where trust, not just digitisation, is becoming the core metric of success.
  
• The EU is shifting from policy and regulatory design to real deployment, with identity wallets, data spaces, and privacy-preserving technologies now entering operational testing.
  
• Digital sovereignty is emerging as a strategic priority, supported by major public investment, regulatory frameworks such as eIDAS 2.0 and the Data Act, and an expanding infrastructure stack.
  
• Citizens increasingly expect control over how their data is used — with privacy concern rising across the bloc — driving initiatives that favour user-centric identity, consent management and data minimisation.
  
• Projects across Europe, including TrustED as one example, are demonstrating how self-sovereign identity, interoperability standards and PET-based data sharing can function in real environments.
  
• The EU vision extends beyond authentication systems toward a federated, privacy-safe digital ecosystem where public services, industries and research collaborate without centralising data.
  
• The coming years will test whether the architecture now being built — wallets, data spaces, sovereign cloud frameworks — can deliver a digital environment where privacy and innovation reinforce each other rather than compete.

(NEWS) Brussels / Strasbourg / Luxembourg / Berlin / Paris / Rome / Madrid, 29-Nov-2025 — /EuropaWire/ — As Europe races to digitise everything from tax systems to hospital records, a parallel race is under way: ensuring that the citizens whose data fuels this transformation remain firmly in control of it. Rising public concern over privacy, a new wave of EU regulation and a growing ecosystem of projects and pilots are converging into a single question: can Europe build a digital future where trust, not just technology, is the defining feature?

Recent moves by the European Union — from the new European Digital Identity (EUDI) framework to common data spaces and large-scale pilots — suggest that the next phase of the “Digital Decade” will be measured less by the number of services put online and more by whether people feel safe using them.

A More Anxious Public, a More Ambitious EU

Public sentiment is a decisive driver. KPMG’s European Privacy Market Research 2024 (PDF) found that 59% of surveyed Europeans say they are more concerned about their privacy than five years ago, with awareness of data breaches and tracking now widespread across demographics.

Policymakers have responded with money as well as rules. According to a 2024 briefing (PDF)by the European Parliamentary Research Service, more than €53 billion of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (over one-third of its total digital-related spending) has been earmarked for digitising public administration and e-government services. The message is clear: digital public services are now core infrastructure.

But digital services cannot function without trust. The same parliamentary brief warns that successful digitalisation hinges on robust identity, secure infrastructure and citizen confidence that their data will not be misused. This is where the EU’s emerging architecture for digital identity, data spaces and privacy-enhancing technologies comes in.

The New Identity Backbone: EUDI Wallets and eIDAS 2.0

At the heart of Europe’s digital trust project is the new European Digital Identity framework. Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, which entered into force in May 2024, updates the eIDAS regulation and mandates that every Member State offer at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) within 24 months of key implementing acts.

These wallets are mobile applications that allow citizens and businesses to prove who they are and share verified attributes — from identity and age to diplomas and professional licences — across borders. Under the timeline set by the regulation, national wallets must be available by late 2026, with many key private-sector services required to accept them by late 2027, including banking, transport, telecoms and “very large online platforms.”

A growing number of pilots and industry coalitions are forming around the wallet concept. In Germany, according to DIE WELT, more than 75 companies have signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal digital ministry and industry group Bitkom to accelerate adoption of the EUDI Wallet, pledging to adapt business processes as the wallet infrastructure matures.

Taken together, these developments mark a shift in how identity is conceived: from a fragmented patchwork of national systems to a pan-European, wallet-based model that aims to be user-controlled, privacy-preserving and interoperable by design.

From Data Access to Data Spaces

Identity is only one side of the trust equation. The other is data itself – where it lives, how it moves and who benefits from it.

The EU’s strategy for data, published in 2020 and now being implemented through legislation such as the Data Act (in force since January 2024 and applicable from September 2025), seeks to make Europe a “leader in the data economy” by enabling wider reuse of industrial and public-sector data while protecting rights and competition.

A central instrument is the concept of Common European Data Spaces: sector-specific ecosystems in areas such as health, mobility, finance, manufacturing and cultural heritage, where data from many actors can be shared under common technical and governance rules.

To support this, the European Commission has funded the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC), tasked with providing reference architectures, standards and tools so that data spaces remain interoperable and “sovereign” — meaning the organisations and individuals who generate data retain control over how it is used.

On the industry side, the Data Spaces Business Alliance (DSBA) brings together associations such as BDVA, FIWARE, Gaia-X and the International Data Spaces Association to align technical and governance approaches and avoid fragmentation.

This model is already being deployed in practice: the data space for cultural heritage, for instance, has been in rollout for several years, connecting museums, archives and platforms around shared standards for metadata, rights and access.

Gaia-X and Sovereign Cloud Infrastructure

Underpinning many of these efforts is a push for sovereign cloud and data infrastructure. Gaia-X, launched in 2019 by Germany and France and now a wider European initiative, aims to create a federated, secure data infrastructure that allows users to share data while retaining control over access and usage.

Rather than a single cloud, Gaia-X defines standards, labels and governance rules that can be applied across providers, making it possible to move and combine data while complying with European requirements on transparency, data protection and competition. The project explicitly positions itself as an answer to concerns about dependency on a small number of non-European cloud giants.

In practice, Gaia-X and related data-space initiatives are creating the “roads and rails” on which trusted digital ecosystems are meant to run.

TrustED: A Case Study in Operationalising Digital Trust

Against this backdrop, the TrustED project offers a concrete example of how Europe is trying to translate high-level principles of data sovereignty and privacy into working technology and user experiences.

TrustED — “Enabling Trustworthy European Data Spaces through Self-Sovereign Identity and Privacy-Preserving Technologies” — is a Horizon Europe project led by Spanish technology centre Gradiant. It focuses on combining self-sovereign identity (SSI), advanced privacy-enhancing technologies and data-space architectures to create citizen-centric digital identity and data-sharing tools.

In November 2025, the consortium announced that TrustED had “kicked off its pilot phase” following a two-day meeting in Rome. According to the press release published on EuropaWire, representatives from ten organisations across Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany and Turkey met to align on technical milestones, interoperability frameworks and evaluation plans for upcoming pilots.

The pilots will test how self-sovereign identity and trustworthy data spaces can support secure, privacy-preserving data exchange in real-world contexts, with scenarios involving citizens, service providers and data controllers. They will examine consent management, interoperability between different identity ecosystems, the use of privacy-preserving technologies and auditability to support transparency and accountability.

A follow-up EuropaWire news coverage described the Rome meeting as “a turning point for EU digital identity,” noting that TrustED is moving from design into operational pilots “involving real users, real data and real governance.” External Advisory Board members — including legal and technical experts — are providing guidance to keep the work aligned with evolving European regulations and best practices.

Technically, TrustED is developing a decentralised digital identity layer that can work with European Digital Identity Wallets, combined with privacy technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption to allow proofs about user attributes without disclosing underlying personal data. It also explores federated learning so that AI models can be trained across multiple institutions — for example, hospitals — without raw data leaving their infrastructure.

In effect, TrustED is stress-testing what a privacy-by-design, user-controlled identity and data-sharing environment might look like in practice.

A Crowded but Complementary Landscape

TrustED is one of several large-scale pilots exploring digital identity and trust in Europe. The European Commission has funded multiple consortia to test EUDI Wallet use cases in areas such as travel, education, social security and payments, all aimed at understanding how wallet-based identity can operate in daily life.

Meanwhile, initiatives coordinated by the Data Spaces Support Centre and DSBA are advancing sectoral data spaces in health, manufacturing, mobility and agriculture, examining how privacy-preserving technologies and standardised connectors can be used to enforce usage control and data sovereignty. 

What unites these efforts is a common architecture:

• A regulatory base (GDPR, eIDAS 2.0, the Data Act and the AI Act) setting legal requirements for identity, privacy, access and accountability.
• An identity layer, increasingly centred on EUDI Wallets, verifiable credentials and, in projects like TrustED, self-sovereign identity principles.
• A data-sharing layer, implemented through data spaces, sovereign cloud initiatives and standardised protocols to move data while keeping control with data holders.
• A privacy and security layer, employing privacy-enhancing technologies such as homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, differential privacy and zero-knowledge proofs. 
  

Within this stack, startups and established companies alike are developing tools for consent management, attribute-based access control, trust frameworks, identity verification and fraud detection. Some focus on specific sectors (such as health data or mobility), while others provide horizontal platforms for integrating wallets and data-space connectors into existing services.

Opportunities — and Friction

Despite clear progress, implementation is not straightforward. Legal scholars and policy analysts point to challenges such as aligning national interpretations of EU rules, ensuring interoperability between different wallet implementations and data spaces, and avoiding new forms of lock-in where a few platforms dominate access to identity or data infrastructure.

Common European data spaces, for instance, require agreement not just on technology but on governance: who decides access conditions, how usage policies are enforced, how compliance is audited, and how smaller actors — including SMEs and civic organisations — can participate on fair terms.

There is also the question of citizen adoption. The KPMG privacy report indicates that while concern about privacy is high, awareness of technical solutions and trust in institutions vary significantly between countries and age groups. The success of EUDI Wallets and projects like TrustED will depend not only on technical robustness but on clear communication, easy-to-use interfaces and visible benefits for users.

The Next Test: From Architecture to Everyday Life

As wallets roll out, data spaces mature and projects like TrustED enter pilot phases, Europe is entering what might be called the “proof” stage of its digital trust strategy. The architectural pieces — regulations, standards, reference models — are largely in place. The question now is whether they can support everyday interactions without adding friction or fear.

If successful, Europeans may soon be able to authenticate to public and private services via a trusted wallet, selectively share attributes without oversharing data, and benefit from AI-driven services built on federated, privacy-preserving access to sensitive datasets. The TrustED pilots in Rome and beyond will be among the earliest tests of whether that vision can withstand the complexity of real users, real data and real governance structures.

For now, Europe’s future of digital trust and data sovereignty remains a work in progress — but it is no longer just a set of policy papers. It is live code, pilot deployments and user interfaces being tested across the continent.