Large Scale Pilots
The Large Scale Pilots are the four consortia that tested the EUDI Wallet in real use cases between 2023 and 2025: EWC, POTENTIAL, NOBID and DC4EU, together more than 350 public authorities and private companies from 26 member states plus Norway, Iceland and Ukraine.
The pilots were co-funded by the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme and started in 2023. Each consortium took a different slice of everyday life and built against the ARF rather than only reading it, so that what eIDAS 2.0 requires in law was tested as working software before member states had to issue a wallet to anyone.
POTENTIAL was the broadest, covering six sectors: access to government services, opening a bank account remotely, registering a SIM card, the mDL as a mobile driving licence, signing with a QES, and ePrescription in healthcare. Most of those start from the PID a member state issues, which is why it had most to say about how identity data reaches the wallet in the first place.
EWC built on the reference wallet for three things: Digital Travel Credentials at border crossings and hotel check-in, payments, and organisational digital identity, so that someone can be recognised as the legal representative of a company anywhere in Europe rather than only at home.
NOBID brought the Nordic countries and Latvia together with Italy and Germany around a single question taken in depth: authorising payments for goods and services from the wallet, in a shop and online, with the same credential a bank already trusts.
DC4EU worked in education and social security, issuing diplomas and professional qualifications as attestations that a university or an employer in another member state can check instantly, alongside the social security entitlements that still travel on paper forms today.
What makes the pilots matter outside their own consortia is the feedback loop. A gap found while issuing a real diploma or paying in a real shop is raised against the ARF and can end up changed in a later revision, so the specification is written against things that actually broke rather than things someone expected to break. The profiles, test suites and findings the pilots publish are also what relying parties and wallet providers build on, instead of starting from the regulation text. The follow-up generation is the second round, selected in 2025: WE BUILD and APTITUDE, which take the same approach into business and payment use cases.
Which Large Scale Pilot tested what?
POTENTIAL covered government services, bank account opening, SIM registration, the mobile driving licence, electronic signatures and ePrescription. EWC covered Digital Travel Credentials, payments and organisational digital identity. NOBID covered payment authorisation. DC4EU covered education and social security. The split was deliberate: four consortia with overlapping membership meant one wallet specification was exercised against very different sectors at the same time, so a problem that only shows up in one sector still reached the people writing the specification.
Are the Large Scale Pilots still running?
The first wave ran from 2023 to 2025. Its successor is already under way: WE BUILD and APTITUDE were selected for the second round of pilots in 2025. WE BUILD runs for two years and extends the method into business and payment use cases. The results of the first wave do not expire with it, because they are what the current version of the ARF and the national wallet rollouts were written against.