Linux Foundation Europe has announced the official formation of the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF). This new, collaborative effort will develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases, including making payments, proving identity, storing validated credentials such as employment, education, financial standing, and entitlements — to enable trust in the digital future.

The OWF will not publish a wallet itself, nor offer credentials or create new standards. Instead, its open source software engine aims to become the core that other organizations and companies leverage to develop their own digital wallets. The wallets will seek feature parity with the best available wallets and interoperability with major cross-border projects such as the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet.

Inaugural Premier members sponsoring the OWF include Accenture, Gen, Futurewei and Visa. General members sponsoring the foundation include American Express, Deutsche Telekom / T-Systems, esatus AG, Fynbos, Hopae, IAMX, IDnow, IndyKite, Intesi Group, Ping Identity, SmartMedia Technologies (SMT), Spruce and Swisscom.

Additionally, 20 leading nonprofits, academic and government entities have joined the foundation, including Customer Commons, Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC), and Digital Dollar Project, among others.

The OWF is the second project hosted by Linux Foundation Europe. Project Sylva was added in November 2022 to create an open source telco cloud software framework.