What Aether Identity explores
Aether Identity is not a product company or consulting shop. It is a neutral thinking space focused on a few deep questions about how digital identity will shape the next decade.
Standards and ecosystem signals watched closely include:
- ISO/IEC 18013 and related mDL standards – defining how mobile driver’s licences are represented on devices and how readers and verifiers securely obtain and validate mDL data, including work on remote and over-the-internet interactions.
- eIDAS 2.0 and European Digital Identity Wallets (EUDI) – rules and timelines that require EU Member States to offer digital identity wallets and foresee regulated sectors accepting them for identification, signatures, and access to services.
- Verifier ecosystems for digital ID – offerings that bring physical ID, mDL and wallet-based IDs into a single verifier experience for sectors such as banking, retail, mobility, and public services.
- Trust and verifiable credentials platforms – stacks that implement credential issuance, holding, and verification using open standards, and introduce concepts such as dynamic verification presets, trust frameworks, and policy-driven flows.
Digital ID & mobile driver’s licences (mDL)
How secure, government-grade digital IDs can move from pilots and airports into everyday businesses — hotels, car rentals, clinics, campuses — without overwhelming them with complexity.
Privacy, reputation & the individual
How increasingly rich identity and behavioural data affect not just security and fraud, but also how people are perceived, scored, and treated over time.
Identity, payments & AI
How identity, payments, and AI agents converge into one fabric of trust, risk, and authorisation — and what it takes to make that fabric accountable, explainable, and fair.
Where Aether Identity is spending time now
Work published under Aether Identity is designed to be practical and visual, grounded in real-world workflows rather than abstract theory.
Digital ID orchestration patterns
Mapping how digital identity can flow across booking, check-in, access, and payments journeys, and what a lightweight orchestration layer between IDs and business systems should look like.
Visual frameworks & explainers
Creating diagrams, tables, and simple narratives that clarify concepts like mobile driver’s licences, wallets, QR vs NFC, and the relationship between identity, privacy, fraud, and user experience.
Experiments & prototypes
Exploring conceptual architectures such as digital ID orchestration layers and AI-driven monitoring of identity interactions. These are explorations, not commercial offerings.
Insights are shared in a neutral, vendor-agnostic way, intended to help practitioners make clearer decisions about where digital identity fits into their own roadmaps.
In practice, this means paying attention to how platforms evolve their verification capabilities, how verifier offerings expand coverage for mobile and wallet-based IDs across sectors like banking and retail, and how regulations such as eIDAS 2.0 and European Digital Identity Wallet timelines shape what “accepting digital ID” will mean for organisations over the next few years.
How digital identity is evolving
Beneath the day-to-day implementations, Aether Identity tracks a few structural shifts that will define how people prove who they are — and how organisations are allowed to use that proof.
From logins to self-sovereign & verifiable credentials
Digital identity is moving from central accounts and passwords towards decentralised identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials held in user-controlled wallets. Issuers such as states, universities, or employers sign credentials; holders control where they are stored; verifiers only see what they need through selective disclosure (for example, proving “over 18” without revealing a full date of birth).
Use cases already emerging include reusable KYC for financial services, patient-controlled health records, cross-border travel credentials, and tamper-evident educational and professional certificates.
State-Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI)
The State-Endorsed Digital Identity model begins from a simple premise: identity belongs to the individual; the state merely endorses it. Utah’s SB260 framework is a leading example, articulating a rights-first approach where individuals control their identifiers, the state provides cryptographic endorsement, and use of the credential must be free from unnecessary surveillance or phone-home checks.
This model treats digital ID as public infrastructure – suitable for accessing government services, airport security, financial KYC, and private-sector interactions – while centring privacy and child protection as non-negotiable design constraints.
Orchestration & risk-based authentication
As more ID formats and trust frameworks emerge, orchestration layers are becoming essential. They sit between identity sources and business applications, coordinating which credential is used, how it is verified, and what additional checks (if any) are required.
Combined with risk-based authentication, orchestration enables adaptive journeys: low-risk activity can stay almost invisible to the user, while high-risk transactions trigger stronger verification. This helps organisations unify policy, reduce fraud, and keep regulatory audits manageable without drowning users in friction.
Stay in the loop or share your perspective
If you’d like to stay informed about new essays, visuals, or experiments from Aether Identity — or you’d like to share context on how your organisation is thinking about digital identity — you can reach out via email.