eIDAS 2

The EU regulation creating an official EU digital identity wallet.

It sets up a government-backed app that people in the European Union can use to store their ID and other credentials and share them with services.

The revised eIDAS framework, requiring every EU member state to offer a European Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet to its citizens and defining qualified trust services, government-certified providers of things like digital signatures and identity verification, that member states must legally recognize. It is formally Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, it entered into force on May 20, 2024, and it amends the original 2014 eIDAS Regulation.

The regulation has several main parts:

• The EUDI wallet, which each member state must make available to citizens, residents, and businesses.
• Electronic attestations of attributes, which are digitally signed claims about a person, such as an age or a qualification, that the wallet can hold.
• Qualified trust services, such as qualified electronic signatures, that member states must legally recognize.
• Relying party rules, which govern the services that accept the wallet and require them to register.

The timeline has two main steps:

1. Wallet availability. Member states must offer at least one wallet by the end of 2026, which is 24 months after the Commission adopted its implementing rules.
2. Acceptance. About a year later, in late 2027, very large online platforms and regulated private sectors that must use strong user authentication, such as banking, have to accept the wallet when a user chooses it.

Using the wallet is voluntary for individuals.

eIDAS 2 sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Digital identity wallet is the app that holds credentials, and the EUDI wallet is the EU's version of it.
• Verifiable credential (VC) is the signed digital document format that wallets can carry.
• Identity assurance level (IAL) is a scale for how confidently an identity was proofed, which wallet credentials can support.