By the end of 2026, every government in the European Union will have to hand its citizens a digital identity wallet.
Erika Maslauskaitė has spent years arguing why they should.
“The way the internet started, it was missing the identity layer,” said the co-founder and chief executive of Lithuanian startup AlongID in an interview with Invezz.
“We do not have any control over our digital identity attributes. Our digital identity attributes are scattered everywhere.”
Her company is building what she calls “the missing trust layer on the internet,” and the law is now pushing Europe in that direction.
eIDAS 2.0 gives banks and other regulated firms until late 2027 to accept the wallet.
For investors, the real question is not whether this happens but who gets paid to build the plumbing underneath.
What eIDAS 2.0 actually forces
The regulation took force in May 2024, and its goal is interoperability: a wallet issued in one member state has to be recognised in the other 26. For Maslauskaitė, the appeal is concrete.
“Being a Lithuanian, I could easily open a bank account in Poland or in Spain,” she said.
“Currently, it’s a challenge because we’re disconnected from each other. So the regulation is an enabler. We’re going to digitize all of the services, and we’re going to be interoperable within [the union], but also across the borders.” Brussels wants 80% of EU citizens to use a digital ID by 2030.
Delivery is the catch. In April 2026, the European Commission said it doubted every member state would launch on time, and none had been certified to the new specifications early in the year.
Domestic apps exist but stay domestic. Poland’s mObywatel passed 12 million users by mid-2026, yet it works only inside Poland.
“The moment people flee the country, it was gone,” Maslauskaitė said of Ukraine’s national app.
“You would need to carry your passport. But what’s missing is an ecosystem. No one is talking about the need for the ecosystem. What the ecosystem does is bring all of the parties together.”
For the analogy, she points to payments, where PSD2 forced banks to open their account data in 2018, and open banking became a business overnight.
The onboarding cost fintechs keep paying
The commercial opening is a cost every regulated firm knows: banks and fintechs verify the same customer over and over.
“KYC and KYB are not enough,” Maslauskaitė said of the know-your-customer and know-your-business checks.
“It’s still not supporting the full verification process that might be required for the business.”
Wiring one provider into a big bank, she added, is brutal.
“It’s like a three-year project. And while the implementation is happening, the regulatory rules might change. The technical requirements might change. The business might change.”
Her fix is a reusable, wallet-based credential. “If you’re a bank, they’re verifying you as a customer each and every time, they’re paying per transaction,” she said.
“If you’re having the wallet, you can establish the visibility because you already have the credential in the wallet. So there is no point in them paying for the repetitive process. They can reuse that credential. And at scale, when there are a lot of transactions, the price just drops dramatically.”
The model, she said, echoes two companies fintech investors know.
“There are plenty of local payment methods that Stripe connected into one core infrastructure,” she said, and AlongID wants to do the same for identity.
The incentives she likens to music: “Same as Spotify did for music, connecting labels with artists, incentivizing them.”
A Lithuanian bet on the “trust layer”
AlongID was spun out of Deverium, a Vilnius software firm founded in 2019 that has done verification work with GB Group, the London-listed identity company.
It raised a €2 million European grant, showed the product at Mobile World Congress in March 2025, and is preparing to launch with a European neobank.
“The core thing is trust infrastructure,” Maslauskaitė said, “a trust network of digital identity attributes where we’re connecting different providers and we’re incentivizing them.”
She is quick to reject the surveillance charge that trails any centralised identity project.
“Our vision is not to become a monopoly,” she said. “Our vision is to actually become an enabler, to bring more trust in terms of connectivity.” Credentials, she said, stay “on the device” and “hashed.”
“I’m not in favor of having the big brother approach. It’s just to use the regulation as an advantage to create additional services, so that we have fewer fraudulent activities.” Identity, in her words, is becoming plumbing for the AI era.
“Behind every agent, you would need to verify who’s acting on the agent’s behalf,” she said.
“With AI, currently you can fake everything; you can literally fake everything. So then there is the point of trust.”
That Lithuania is the launchpad is no accident. The Bank of Lithuania spent a decade courting fintechs with a lighter electronic money institution licence and English-language paperwork, the route Revolut took when it won a specialised bank licence and an EMI licence in Vilnius in December 2018.
Invest Lithuania counts about 248 fintech firms and ranks the country first in the EU by fintech licences issued, the scene that produced unicorns Vinted and Nord Security.
What it means for investors
The prize is sizable. Grand View Research puts the digital identity market at nearly $47 billion in 2025 and $135 billion by 2033; MarketsandMarkets sees it at $44 billion and rising to $132 billion by 2031.
The field is crowded, from Norway’s Signicat and Germany’s IDnow to GB Group and Lithuanian rivals iDenfy and Ondato. Maslauskaitė’s bet is on the demand below the big banks.
“Regulation in general is being very much written towards big corps,” she said, “but who is actually forgotten is like the accounting firm of 10 people. Great accountants, but they have no expertise about identity at all, but in that specific industry, it’s so much needed in order to minimize risk in their business.”
What happens next, she argues, comes back to trust. “How do we verify what is true and authentic and what is not?” she said.
“For that, we need the critical legitimate infrastructure that is licensed.”
Maslauskaitė argues the regulation has already created the demand; the remaining question is which companies will build the infrastructure.
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