OpenWallet Foundation Officially Launched | Interview With Founder Daniel Goldscheider

### Overview In this interview, Daniel Goldscheider discusses the official February launch of the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), an initiative announced the previous year at the Open Source Summit in Europe. Legally established under Linux Foundation Europe and based in Brussels, the foundation aims to develop open source software components that allow anyone to publish multi-purpose digital wallets. Goldscheider clarifies that OWF is neither a standard development organization (SDO) competing with groups like the OpenID Foundation, Decentralized Identity Foundation, or W3C, nor a wallet publisher itself. Instead, it focuses on the software layer situated between standards and published wallets.

### Key Topics - **Mission and Scope:** Developing community-driven open source software components to power diverse wallet use cases rather than building a single monolithic wallet or defining new standards. - **Fragmentation and Standards:** Overcoming the complexity of numerous disparate standards (such as separate standards for car keys versus physical building doors, payment cards, and passkeys) by providing shared, standard-compliant implementations. - **Governance and Structure:** Operating under Linux Foundation Europe with its own board of directors, budget, and a Governmental Advisory Council (GAC) to coordinate across startups, large enterprises, non-profits, and sovereign governments. - **Browser Engine Analogy:** Mirroring the model of modern web browsers, where competitors share core rendering engines (such as Blink or WebKit) on top of open standards and differentiate on the user interface and experience. - **Bottom-Up "Do-ocracy":** Letting market needs and community contributions dictate which protocols and credential formats flourish, rather than enforcing top-down decisions.

### Technical Details - **Diverse Use Cases:** Components are intended to address identity, tokenized credit/debit payments, car keys, physical access control, FIDO passkeys (intended to replace passwords), health credentials, airline access, and crypto tokens or NFTs. - **Shared Reference Code:** Goldscheider points to ISO mDL (mobile driver's licenses) as a key example. While single-vendor codebases (such as Google's published code on GitHub) have been valuable, broad multi-stakeholder collaboration can better maintain and extend fundamental wallet components. - **Interoperability and Ecosystems:** The foundation is open to supporting technologies across various bodies, whether Linux Foundation projects like Hyperledger or external industry specifications like EMVCo.

### Takeaways OWF seeks to commoditize the core "guts" of digital wallets so companies do not have to independently implement complex, overlapping standards. By fostering a bottom-up developer ecosystem and engaging both the private sector and sovereign public bodies, the foundation aims to provide flexible, shared open source building blocks while allowing vendors to compete on user interface, convenience, and distinct feature sets.