FIDES
FIDES, in full FIDES - Accelerating Digital Trust, is a European community of organisations working on digital trust in practice: it catalogues what is actually running on verifiable credentials, and publishes the interoperability profiles that let those implementations talk to each other.
Its most visible parts are the Ecosystem Explorer, a public catalogue of live digital identity use cases and the wallets behind them; the Blue Pages, a decentralised catalogue in which organisations and the credentials they accept can be looked up; and the Community Awards, voted on with a credential in a wallet rather than an account and a password. FIDES also maintains DIIP, the interoperability profile that pins down which existing specifications a conformant wallet has to implement. Alongside it, FIDES Labs is a Dutch initiative where public and private parties run pragmatic pilots, among them the e-invoicing and tax-splitting pilots Credenco works on with the Belastingdienst. Membership is open to any organisation willing to contribute, and most of its output, the Ecosystem Explorer entries, the Blue Pages listings and the DIIP specification text itself, is published openly rather than kept behind a paywall or a member-only portal. Work happens in focused working groups that report back to a plenary community meeting, which keeps DIIP's twice-yearly release cycle grounded in what implementers are actually running into rather than in theory. FIDES sits alongside, not inside, the WE BUILD consortium: WE BUILD builds the EU Digital Identity Wallet for business under public funding, while FIDES is the wider community where implementers, including several WE BUILD participants, compare notes and align on the profiles that make their separate wallets interoperate in practice.
Is FIDES a European Union body?
No. FIDES is an independent, non-profit community of organisations working on digital trust, not an EU institution. It runs alongside official EU work such as WE BUILD and the ARF, contributing tools like the Ecosystem Explorer, the Blue Pages and the DIIP interoperability profile that implementers use in practice, but its work is driven by voluntary member contribution rather than by legislative mandate.