A group of businesses and nonprofits working together to develop an open source software stack will help advance a variety of interoperable wallets.
The OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to facilitate interoperability for a wide variety of wallet use cases, was announced today by the Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organisation. Leading businesses in the technology, public sector, and industrial vertical divisions, as well as standardisation bodies, have already lent their support to the project.
The goal of the OWF is to create an open source engine that is secure, versatile, and anyone can use to create interoperable wallets. By working together on open source code, the OWF wants to establish best practises for digital wallet technology that can be used as a jumping off point by anybody wishing to create interoperable, safe, and privacy-protecting wallets.
The OWF has no plans to release its own wallet, provide credentials, or establish any new standards. The community’s efforts will be directed toward creating an open source software engine that other businesses and organisations can use to create their own digital wallets. The wallets aim to achieve feature parity with the finest wallets currently on the market and will support a wide range of use cases, including identities, payments, and digital keys.
Jim Zemllin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, stated, “We are confident that digital wallets will be essential for digital societies. Security and interoperability rely on open software. We are enthused about the OpenWallet Foundation’s potential and are thrilled to host it.
Pramod Varma, Chief Architect Aadhaar & India Stack, states, “Verifiable credentials are becoming an essential digital empowerment tool for billions of people and small entities. India has been at the forefront of it and is going all out to convert all physical certificates into digitally verifiable credentials via the very successful Digilocker system. I am very excited about the OWF effort to create an interoperable and open source credential wallet engine to supercharge the credentialing infrastructure globally.”
