The BMWi project ONCE aims to build decentralized, human-centric, open ID wallets to unify and manage multiple different digital identities of an individual. While the use of digital services with identities issued by trusted governmental entities is the main focus, the evolving ecosystem should remain open to other (potentially less trusted) issuers and users/verifies of such identities (also called relying parties) in the sense of self-sovereign identity (SSI).

The CDL Digidow primarily focuses on the use of digital identities in the physical world, e.g. to open doors or travel on public transport. While ONCE and Digidow share all of the most important core principles – particularly an explicit, self-sovereign, data minimization driven approach to digital identity with-out massive, centralized instances of data collection – and put privacy and individual control in their focus, they are orthogonal in their respective research focus areas.

Our main goal is to bridge these two projects to enable optimal and obvious synergies in the creation, management, and use of digital identities for a broad population.