The European Cooperative IDunion emerged from a research project of the same name, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action between 2021 and 2024.
The goal of the 15 consortium partners involved in the research project was to enable the development of a fundamentally new, secure infrastructure for verifying identity data based on a jointly operated distributed database.
In the IDunion research project, a variety of use cases were tested in pilot implementations.
The technical network was collaboratively built and utilized by various actors, including private companies, associations, cooperatives, government institutions, educational establishments, and other legal forms.
In July 2022, IDunion SCE, a European Cooperative Society with limited liability (Societas Cooperativa Europaea, or SCE), was established by selected partners within the research project. IDunion SCE serves as the operating company for the technical network for productive applications and is responsible for managing and regulating all processes, components, and regulatory aspects.
Due to its legal form, the European cooperative offers ideal conditions for utilizing digital credentials within a Europe-wide and transparent ecosystem. It also meets all requirements for an excellent data location policy that retains core competencies at the European level while being internationally applicable.
Companies can join IDunion SCE as members
Membership qualifies them to operate a network node and work collaboratively with other members on application examples in compliance with antitrust laws. Through membership, members gain access to international research projects focused on self-sovereign identity (SSI) and digital identities, such as Catena-X, the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI), or large-scale European pilots like the European Wallet Consortium or the We Build Consortium. As a neutral organization, IDunion SCE is also ready to support industry-specific use cases with governance.
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