The swiyu Ecosystem

With swiyu, Switzerland is creating a shared trust infrastructure. It provides the technical foundations for digital identities, verifiable credentials and trust services to be used securely across organisations.

These foundations include registries, generic components for issuing and verifying credentials, and wallets. Information can be presented so that the receiving party verifies its origin and validity itself. This requires no query to the original source, and the data being used is never collected centrally.

The technical infrastructure is the foundation. An ecosystem emerges through its use: through organisations that issue and verify credentials, applications that create tangible value from them, Trust Services Providers, and shared standards, specifications and governance.

Public administration, business, education, science and research, and civil society all have a role to play. Solutions should connect to one another: what is developed and learned in one use case should, where appropriate, be reusable across other organisations, industries and sectors.

The swiyu ecosystem connects different actors and roles.

Any economic or public organisation can issue, verify and hold credentials. Within a single use case, one organisation often takes several roles, for example verifying an incoming credential and issuing a new one.

Alongside these roles are the organisations and sectors where actual use takes place: federal, cantonal and municipal administrations, companies and industry associations, universities and schools, research institutions, NGOs, communities and other civil-society actors.

Technical roles and economic, public and societal actors together form the ecosystem.

Roles in the swiyu trust infrastructure. Graphic: swiyu documentation, swiyu-admin-ch.github.io

The starting point is the concrete use case.

Where documents are manually checked today, information is entered repeatedly, authorisations are confirmed by phone, or data is reconciled between organisations, verifiable credentials create new possibilities.

A good use case digitises a process and clarifies which information needs to be reliably available, who can attest it, who needs it, and under which conditions it may be used. This work produces reusable building blocks:

A single use case becomes a foundation for further applications. A defined schema, a clarified trust model or an established governance structure is then available to other organisations and sectors.

Verifiable credentials create value where issuers and verifiers come together. The two sides invest for different reasons.

Ecosystem orchestration brings both sides together early. Requirements can be clarified jointly, and solutions can be developed that work for several participants.

Use cases are particularly suited to joint ecosystem work when several of these characteristics come together:

This creates network effects over time: new credentials use existing verification capabilities, established schemas are applied in additional contexts, and experience with governance and regulation is already available to the next project.

Many use cases can be understood through five simple questions. They serve as an orientation model for comparing requirements across industries and sectors.

The last two questions broaden the perspective beyond digital identity. Verifiable data creates economic and societal value in many situations where a state-issued E-ID is not required.

For a credential to be useful beyond its original use case, its technical and semantic foundations need to fit together: data models and schemas, protocols for issuance and presentation, mechanisms for status and revocation, trust registries and existing domain standards.

Where international standards and specifications exist, they are used and further developed. Domain semantics from areas such as education, healthcare, mobility or financial services stay in place; trust infrastructure complements them with verifiable origin, integrity and authorisation.

This is how a local implementation becomes a reusable building block.

Trust in a credential has two levels. Technical Trust establishes whether a credential is cryptographically valid: who issued it, whether it is unchanged and what its status is. Human Trust establishes whether the assertion can be relied upon in substance.

Human Trust concerns roles and rules: Who is permitted to issue a particular credential? Which requirements must an organisation meet? Which information may a verifier request? Who grants or withdraws an authorisation? How are responsibilities distributed? Governance answers these questions.

Reliable trust emerges when both levels work together: technology and standards secure Technical Trust, while clearly defined roles and governance that sets the conditions under which an assertion is accepted secure Human Trust.

Trust statements link Technical Trust with Human Trust. Graphic: swiyu documentation, swiyu-admin-ch.github.io

Some questions can only be answered in practice. Especially in regulated environments, a concrete use case often shows how technical capabilities, regulation, data protection, governance and operational responsibilities interact.

Experimentation is therefore part of building the ecosystem. Prototypes, pilots and, where the regulatory framework allows, regulatory sandboxing provide controlled environments in which participants gain practical experience.

What is learned feeds back into specifications, standards, governance and further use cases. This creates an iterative learning process between practice, technology and regulation.

An ecosystem of independent actors grows in a decentralised way. It needs structures that enable collaboration and make knowledge reusable. Ecosystem orchestration therefore means:

DIDAS performs this role particularly across business, education and civil society, working with the responsible public authorities and other participants in the swiyu ecosystem.

Sovereign decisions remain with the competent authorities. DIDAS contributes by activating and supporting the ecosystem and by turning knowledge from concrete applications into reusable foundations.

Longer-term responsibility for domains and cross-sector functional areas, supported by clear Governance and dedicated funding.

Open components and transparent specifications make participation and reuse easier.

The Confederation provides core components of the swiyu trust infrastructure as open source on GitHub, including generic components for issuing and verification, registry services, DID tooling, resolvers and wallet implementations. Cookbooks support organisations getting started as issuers or verifiers.

Open swiyu components. Graphic: swiyu documentation, swiyu-admin-ch.github.io

DIDAS complements this technical foundation with open tools that emerge from practical ecosystem work.

The immediate benefit of verifiable credentials often lies in simpler processes: less manual verification, fewer process breaks, more reliable data and faster verification.

The larger potential goes further. When information can be reliably verified and reused across organisational boundaries, applications and transactions become possible whose verification today is too complex, too slow or too expensive. Value moves from the individual verification step to the applications built on trusted, reusable data.

Global Standards. Local Governance.

The swiyu ecosystem develops through concrete applications.

Do you know a process in which documents are manually checked, information is submitted repeatedly, authorisations require cumbersome clarification, or data is reconciled between organisations? It may be a candidate for verifiable credentials.

The swiyu Launchpad provides the framework for exploring, testing and developing such use cases together.