By Julie (Jeemin) Seo

Digital ID Verification (IDV) is broken and needs an alternative. Even under unprecedented development of technology and security measures, there are still many cases of ID/certificate forgery and spam/scam accounts. According to Techopedia, our everyday apps including Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, WhatsApp, etc. could put our personal and sensitive data at risk, and we are seeing increasing number of news flows regarding personal data leakage incidents.

Since 2010s, the EU has been keen on protecting their citizens’ online transactions. In Nov-23, eIDAS 2.0, which is the updated version of Electronic Identification, Authentication, and Trust Services (eIDAS) regulation, reached a final agreement among European Parliament and the Council of the EU. As of Apr-24, the regulation was published in the Official Journal of the European Union and entered into force at the end of April this year.

The key change in eIDAS 2.0 is the introduction of ‘European Digital Identity Framework’ through the adoption of ‘European Digital Identity Wallet’ (hereinafter, EUDI Wallet). This will have a significant impact across public/private sectors (e.g., government, financial, enterprises, etc.) According to the regulation, each Member States are required to offer at least one EUDI Wallet to all citizens and residents by 2026. Currently, it is in a Large Scale Pilot (LSP) phase, in which 350+ private companies and public authorities participate in test building EUDI Wallet use cases. This will guide system design and architecture development by providing feedbacks on the Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF), a technical document that will serve as a basis for the ‘European Digital Identity Framework’.

The basic prerequisites of EUDI Wallet are as follows:

・The source code should be open-sourced licensed

・Wallet should use Verifiable Credentials (VCs) standard from W3C, which are digital credentials that are cryptographically verified

・Technology should be based on JSON Web Tokens (SD-JWT) which permits selective information sharing, thus giving users greater control over personal information

Hopae Inc. is a company that aims to become a ‘Stripe for IDV’. Meeting all the above prerequisites, Hopae provides identity verification solution and wallet SDK leveraging their blockchain-based decentralized identity (hereinafter, DID) technology in just a few lines of code towards global enterprises to implement EUDI Wallet effortlessly.

New regulations bring huge market opportunities as we’ve witnessed through EU’s Cookie Policy, which acted as a cornerstone of compliance under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect in 2018. Founded in 2016, OneTrust, a privacy and security software company that provided a cookie consent solution, benefited a US$4bn market by GDPR in action. Sharing similar objectives – to ensure a trusted and secure digital identity and give users control over personal data, we believe Hopae could address larger market based on broader wallet use cases and sophisticated tech stack.

We believe Hopae is best positioned to be a game changer in this backdrop for the following reasons:

・Strong founding team with tech expertise and unrivaled experience developing and operating nationwide scale of DID-based authentication system: Hopae’s CEO & Founder Ace Shim is the core founding & operating member of ‘COOV’, a DID-based COVID-19 Vaccination Certificate, which was used with nationwide scalability in Korea. It handled high-demand conditions with 43mn MAU, 100% uptime and interoperability in Europe and Singapore

・Head start positioning as a tech provider within the digital wallet industry: Ace is a proud founding member of the OpenWallet Foundation (the Linux Foundation), which is a consortium of companies and non-profit organizations collaborating to drive global adoption of open, secure and interoperable digital wallet solutions as well as providing advice through their Government Advisory Council; Ace was also nominated as the 8th Technical Advisory Council board member, sitting shoulder to shoulder with thought leaderships not only in European Commission, but also global enterprises including VISA, Google, etc. In Jul-24, Hopae was recognized as a representative vendor for DID in the ‘2024 Gartner Market Guide Report’, which we believe reflects Hopae’s significant contributions and innovative solutions in the DID sector