2026 Digital ID Predictions: What’s Next for the Industry?

Chapters

• 0:00 — Opening and introductions

• 3:25 — Introduction to Trinsic

• 7:30 — Digital ID predictions from 2025

• 9:45 — Digital ID trends from 2025

• 17:30 — Anticipated digital ID launches in 2026

• 24:06 — Predictions for 2026

• 47:25 — Q&A

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Zack Jones: Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining. We will get started in just a couple minutes, so let me get everything set up on our end. Let me bring Riley up here. Okay. Awesome. All right. Hey, Riley.

Riley Hughes: Hey, Zack.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Great, we're here. People are joining. We'll give it a couple minutes. Let folks trickle in. We'll get started, you know, four or five minutes after the hour here probably. Yeah. How's everything going, Riley?

Riley Hughes: It's going good. Normally I'm more than happy to start four or five minutes after, but I'm like, we could use almost every minute we've got here.

Zack Jones: Yeah, yeah. There is a lot of content to get through. This was a fun one to put together because a lot has happened in the last year in the digital identity space, and a lot is going to happen next year, maybe even more than this year. So there is a lot of action to get into.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I think we could just get started.

Zack Jones: And then I think there's already a number of people here, and we will share out, as always, we'll share out the recording afterwards. So if people do miss a few minutes at the beginning or the end, you can watch it back. But we also want to make sure we leave time for questions and answers as well. So if you do have questions throughout the webinar, feel free to drop them in the Q&A. And if it's quick, we might get to it kind of in the flow of the presentation, or— If not, we'll get to it at the end, or we'll try to get through as many as we can in the allotted time here. So, yeah. But yeah, I think with that, Riley, if you want to share your screen and get ready to jump into it,

Riley Hughes: sounds good. All right. Let's do it. You should be able to see my screen. Can I get a thumbs up, Zack?

Zack Jones: Yep, looks good.

Riley Hughes: Okay, great. Well, excited to be here with everybody for our, what's now become our annual tradition of, it's like, you know, my favorite holiday tradition nowadays is, you know, giving my sort of next year's predictions on how the digital ID landscape will evolve. And, yeah, this year is no different. This year, Santa's been good to us or whatever, right? Because we've got a lot, a lot of goodies to cover today. So, first, I think, yeah, introductions, trends from 2025. So this is sort of recapping what we predicted last year and then kind of how the landscape actually played out. There are some launches that I think we'll be paying attention to that we expect to launch in 2026. And then we've got some predictions to make, which is fun because these predictions, some of which are pretty, like, I think we feel pretty strongly about, and other ones are a bit of a shot in the dark, and we've blended them all together so you'll have no idea which ones are which, and that's part of the fun of it.

Riley Hughes: So, in terms of introductions, I want to mention what Trinsic does for anybody who's new or anybody who's just watching this afterward who doesn't already know. Today, identity verification, generally speaking, is done by taking a picture of a plastic card and a selfie and uploading those for verification, right? And in the best case scenario, it's, you know... Takes like 50 seconds or something. And it's a cat and mouse game between the AI-driven fraudsters who are trying to get better and better at making fake documents and biometric deepfakes and things like that all the time, and the companies who are fighting the fraud. And so that's the state of the identity verification industry today. And I think tomorrow it'll look a little more like, you know, double tap from your, you know, from your iPhone or your, you know, fingerprint on your screen on your Android or, you know, whatever the case may be, or you're redirected out to your identity wallet and you consent to share your data that way.

Riley Hughes: And not only is this superior from a privacy standpoint, but it's a great user experience as well. So what Trinsic does is we connect to a whole bunch of different sources of digital ID. Typically these are wallets. Sometimes they are what you might call a cloud-based wallet or something, right, where it's like you have an account or a wallet in the cloud somewhere and you're redirected out through your web browser to authenticate to it. And other times in certain parts of the world, they may have government biometric registries or databases that allow businesses to authenticate their users. But either way, Trinsic sort of aggregates these and makes them available through one API. And over the last year, we've been busy integrating lots of digital IDs. This kind of shows the timeline for when these have been added to the platform. And, you know, we're busy over here, right, because digital IDs are not only growing quickly where they are adopted, but there are new ones launching all the time.

Riley Hughes: And figuring out how to adopt them is complicated because, you know, like, the mapping between concepts is not perfectly clear, right? So it's not like there's, like, one digital ID per country or something. If there was, that would be much easier to reason about. But something like Apple Wallet, you know, there are—it exists in the U.S., but not everywhere in the U.S. It's only in whatever 15 states or something, right? And it also exists in Japan, but only for a certain type, you know, credential type. And, you know, some eIDs cover multiple countries, like Yoti. for example, in the UK has coverage, or has users in the U.S. and France and Italy and Netherlands, you know, beyond just the UK. But it's primarily, you know, most of its adoption is in the UK, and so it's like, how do you reason about this stuff? You know, this stuff is complicated. This is what Trinsic tries to help with, both in terms of the information about digital IDs, as well as the technical integration and the legal and governance framework implications on using these.

Riley Hughes: So last year, when we did this kind of predictions webinar or whatever, we were tracking 220 digital IDs around the world. Today we're tracking 297. So this has become quite a task to track all these things. But it shows the kind of growth of just new digital IDs that are coming online around the world. We could break down digital ID into eIDs from governments, reIDs, or reusable IDs from the private sector, and, you know, usually bank IDs. You know, we sort of separate those out into their own category because it's maybe a private sector, but very heavily regulated, so it's very government-influenced or whatever. So it's a bit of a hybrid, and these are sort of bank IDs around the world certainly have quite a bit of adoption as well. Okay, well, let's get into the predictions from last year. Some of these are a bit vanilla, and I've tried to spice these up this year to make them a little more entertaining, hopefully. But if you read through these, I think these predictions were— are generally pretty good.

Riley Hughes: I mean, if you look at, you know, more businesses accepting digital IDs, that's certainly true. Twenty-five states with live mDLs with remote verification. That was a strong, you know, it's like, I'm glad we made that prediction. In reality, there are 22 states with a live mDL right now. And by the way, there would have been 25 if certain mDL programs had persisted, but there are certain states that have, you know, are switching vendors or are temporarily paused the mDL program or are going to relaunch it in 2026 or something like that, where, like, you know, so there have been 25 states do an mDL ever, but today there are 22 that are live. And of that, only 16 or 17 of them support remote verification in some form. So while, you know, this was a good prediction directionally, it's certainly, you know, we're not quite there.

Riley Hughes: And then I think, you know, on the eIDAS point, right, we can point to some countries which are launching, you know, wallets, EUDI or eIDAS 2.0 kind of style wallets early, which are maybe, you know, don't exactly have a lot of adoption yet, but are sort of launching early. And I think it's probably that second-to-last bullet point as well is pretty on point, that it's pretty rare to find an ID verification company right now that doesn't have some form of a reusable ID incorporated into their platform. So what we did to identify some of these trends. So every week or two, I think it's every two weeks. Anyway, Zack, you can correct me in the chat or something. But every week or two, we send out a newsletter that recaps sort of what's happening in the digital ID space. And if you're not subscribed to this newsletter, I encourage you to go subscribe. It's just a really quick read that just recaps the big points that probably are going to be interesting to you, certainly if you're here at this webinar. It's called the Future of Identity newsletter. Find it on our website.

Riley Hughes: And basically what we did is we took all the webinars from—or sorry, all the newsletters from 2025 and fed them into our friend ChatGPT and asked it to pull out the trends, right? So if you had to pull out the trends from these, what would they be? And here are the trends, right? So I can walk through these in some subsequent slides here. First one is mobile IDs becoming core infrastructure. There are, you know, across the U.S. and globally, physical IDs are moving to digital, and it's not necessarily moving in a uniform way. The way that this is taking place is happening differently in different places and with different types of credentials, but is certainly happening with launches, you know, basically every week. Next one is that reusable identity networks are consolidating. So from kind of consolidation in the just general identity verification landscape of companies to sort of Companies focusing on, like, expanding the offering from maybe being more of a point solution to starting to offer more elements of digital IDs from issuance all the way to acceptance.

Riley Hughes: This has certainly been a trend to follow as well with things like, you know, Plaid offering, you know, expanding the capabilities of their reusable ID persona, launching not only reusable personas, which has been done in the past, but also the new Persona Connect product, as well as companies like Ondato and Shufti and others releasing reusable age verification. Jumio recently released one. I mean, I could go on and on and on and on down the list, you know, talking about the kinds of, you know, solutions that are out here, but it certainly is, again, every week seems like there's more news in this. direction. The other point is that, you know, as AI becomes more and more capable, the question of who's behind the AI becomes more and more sort of on point.

Riley Hughes: And I think, you know, recently, you know, this year at the AAMVA Global Conference in Phoenix, Trinsic attended with one of our partners at Indeed, showing how Indeed was able to use mDLs in connection with some of the AI-related things that they're doing to, you know, accept candidates and verify candidates are who they say they are, and that it's actually the right person submitting the resume or whatever. You know, this is one example of many, many, many launches or sort of demonstrations that we've seen throughout the last year in this vein. You know, look no further than kind of, I mean, in September at GBG's global kind of customer conference, they had a whole panel and showcase around agentic AI and building trust in agentic AI workflows.

Riley Hughes: At Money20/20, Incode released an agentic AI kind of ID verification tool, and Vouched is another ID verification company that's making really strong moves into this agentic AI space with a whole KYA framework and with mDLs and digital IDs at the forefront of the merger between You know, the AI agent, the new needs that emerge in this new agentic world, with the expectations of consumer convenience and user experience that people have coming into this as well. So these are some areas that would be really worth looking at, and I think, again, constantly seeing, you know, trends in this space. The next one is that, you know, although the core kind of, you know, when we started Trinsic in 2019, we were a verifiable credential platform, right? Our customers all used us to issue verifiable credentials. Today, we are used for accepting digital IDs, whether they're based on standard credentials or not.

Riley Hughes: So Trinsic has evolved a little bit, but it's cool to see in this last little while how it seems like the original premise that Trinsic started off with in 2019 is starting to come more to fruition with, you know, places like, you know, Costa Rica launching with a privacy-preserving digital credential infrastructure, Singapore with SingPass, you know, talking about migrating or upgrading their infrastructure to use mDocs instead of the sort of traditional OIDC-type infrastructure that's in production today, as well as, you know, we can look all over, you know, Ukraine, right, with the Diia app as well and the adoption that that has and the strength of that. I mean, we're seeing sort of privacy-first, user-centric storage on user device-type digital IDs growing much more quickly recently than I think we certainly did in the past, which is awesome. Makes me super happy.

Riley Hughes: And then the next one is, I think there's a strong kind of, you know, in the political realm, we see kind of, you know, nationalism, and we see, you know, many other trends that are above my pay grade to get into here, obviously, kind of emerging around the world. And as a part of that, we see kind of identity infrastructure being viewed as a sovereign thing or a national security, national infrastructure, you know, type of a thing, right? So what we end up seeing is basically international hesitancy toward, you know, delegating the entire national ID infrastructure to an American tech company, for example, like an Apple or a Google. And so we see really a lot of national, like nation-state level interest in building strong identity systems that are sovereign and independent to them, that can persist without reliance on, you know, the current global order. And most of these are based on standards to some degree, you know, with varying standards, you know, varying degrees there.

Riley Hughes: But it certainly is the case that nations around the world are moving in this direction, and it's not necessarily all in the exact same path, right? So same direction, different path maybe is how I would frame that. So that's a recap of the predictions we made last year and the trends that we're seeing right now. Next, I want to talk about the launches that we expect to see in 2026, and that we're really, you know, highly anticipating. So the first category here is EUDI. This is probably an obvious one, where, you know, the end of 2026 is when each EU member state country is supposed to have its own EUDI Wallet shipped in production. And I think we'll get into exactly how I think that'll go here in the predictions section of the webinar in a little bit later. But suffice it to say, I mean, there's certainly going to be news in this vein, and it's going to be big news because everybody's paying attention. to this. Everybody's looking at this as the model that, you know, a lot of the rest of the world is going to certainly be influenced by.

Riley Hughes: And there will definitely be, I think, countries that launch wallets aligned to the UDI specifications. And it'll be really, really, really interesting to pay close attention to how those get adopted by users. You know, to the extent that users, you know, if we see these things just ripping in terms of their adoption, that is going to really encourage other countries to follow suit. It's going to really encourage relying party adoption. Of course, these things are related, right? You need relying parties to accept them in order for consumers to want to go get them. But at any rate, it'll be interesting to see exactly how the early EUDI launches play out. I think we have a slide on this. Yeah, we do. So this is a slide kind of showing where things are at, the sort of, kind of, you know, whether there is an EUDI Wallet there or not, and kind of how it's developing. And so, yeah, I think I'll just leave this up here for just a minute.

Riley Hughes: Shout out to the—I have my Zoom, my screen sharing thing is blocking the name of the company right here, but I bet you can't see my Zoom screen sharing thing, so you can see the university that— Published this, so shout out to them. Okay, the next bullet point here is about mobile driver's licenses and specifically the ISO 18013-7 specification, which was recently finalized and I think is, you know, certainly being implemented in a lot of eyeballs on this around the world because what this standard enables is for mDLs to be used online. So instead of just using them in person at, like, an airport, for example, where there is specialized hardware and NFC, Bluetooth readers and all of that, you know, you can just present it to a website and the website can handle all that stuff. And then there's no specialized hardware needed. You can just use cloud-based infrastructure like Trinsic to accept and validate those mDLs. So it's really, you know, it's going to be an exciting development. And I think 2026 is going to be the year that this standard takes off in the U.S. and Australia.

Riley Hughes: These are the two geographies that I'm really paying attention to. I think Australia is really interesting because there are a lot of mDLs in circulation, or I should say there are a lot of digitized driver's licenses in circulation, certainly most of which are not based on the mDL standards, but that are moving to those standards. And we recently did a podcast with Chris Goh, who is very active in that part of the world and very involved in that ecosystem, and we did a deep dive into this. But I think in 2026, this will be the year that Australia, you know, not only becomes more standards-based, but also begins. Adopting the remote verification specifications. And in the U.S., we have this graphic that shows kind of the historical growth rate over time of new states launching, and this is our sort of prediction, and we're holding out for a few of these here in the 2025 column. So we'll see what gets over the line before the end of the year on this. So the next bullet point that I want to talk about is the Gov.UK wallet.

Riley Hughes: This is really interesting because there has been probably nowhere on planet Earth with more news and fervor and excitement and trepidation and anxiety and emotion about digital ID than has been in the UK. And that is because of announcements made by new political leadership, and it's certainly become very politicized. Certainly has been a big topic there. But the Gov.UK wallet is sort of independent of that. I mean, it is, it's like this wallet app is going to allow people to get their driver's license, mobile driver's license. Already people can get their veterans card in this wallet, and it will support remote verification and use cases for proving one's identity in the private sector. So there's sort of a, obviously a big, you know, a lot of people paying attention, a lot of conversation about this potential centralized digital ID that will come in a few years or something. But I think, you know, what's happening right now is that there, regardless of whether that even happens, right, like maybe that doesn't even happen, who knows.

Riley Hughes: But like, regardless of whether that happens, like this is happening. The Gov.UK wallet is happening with digital credentials, and I don't think there's really any objection to this because it's just like, you know, it's like we already have a driver's license, might as well get it on your You know, get it digitally as well. And so that's exciting. We're excited to watch how that develops as well. And then the remainder of kind of private sector IDVs that don't already have reusable ID or accept digital IDs, I think will be very likely to begin doing so in 2026. Okay. Now we have gotten to the point of the webinar where I pull out my crystal ball. I should have, like, bought, like, a crystal ball on Amazon or something and had, like, a prop here. That would have been fun. But this is the part of the webinar where I get to have a little bit of fun and where my prognostication hat and predict how this landscape will evolve. Some of these predictions are, yeah, I feel pretty confident in.

Riley Hughes: I think are actually good predictions and maybe a little contrarian, so maybe not everyone would agree with me, but I think they're at least interesting predictions. Other ones are a bit of a shot in the dark. So let's see how this plays out. So my first prediction is that as AI agents become increasingly capable, trustworthiness online will be a central topic in the zeitgeist. So what I predict, this is a bit of a fuzzy one. There's no real way to, like, measure this objectively. So I will just state that I think if some AI CEO or identity company CEO sits on Good Morning America or, you know, a show like that and talks about how digital ID is important for, you know, as AI becomes increasingly capable and scams and fraud become more and more of a problem, that will mean that this prediction has come true. The other piece of this is I think that this will drive a lot of attention into the identity industry, but I do not think that it will necessarily drive a ton of 2026 volume. But I do think it will be a major contributor to 2027 and beyond. That is my current thinking.

Riley Hughes: Okay, let's go North America. I've got a couple predictions, a couple predictions for my continent. My first prediction is that Apple Wallet will expand into Canada and will not expand into any new countries, any other ones, right? So, like, sort of they're already in Japan, U.S., expand into Canada. This is not based on any information. I just—this is one of those ones that's a bit of a shot in the dark. I have no insider knowledge here. But I think, I think the—underneath this, I think it is the case that if you are an organization whose strategy is to focus on adopting Apple and Google wallets and ignore the other digital IDs that exist, I think you would be wise to rethink that strategy, right? Because I think, regardless of whether this specific prediction is true, you know, I don't think Apple is going to be in every country or anywhere close to it in 2026. Okay, my next prediction is that mDL in the U.S. will be politicized and scapegoated during the midterm elections for reasons related to voter ID laws.

Riley Hughes: Now, I hope that this prediction is wrong, but alas, I think it is more likely than not, maybe, that one side of the aisle or another will—and I think it's like a coin toss as to who. Like, I could literally steelman the case for either side of the aisle basically, you know, calling this out. And then, of course, this, like, reflexively, I think the other side will immediately kind of take the other point of view because, of course, you know, you can't, like, agree on something, right? That would be crazy. But I think there will be, like, tension and, you know, related to, you know, in this vein. And, you know, I'm not sure yet whether that'll be good for mDL and digital ID generally because, you know, on the one hand, attention and, yeah, relevance is something that these things need in order to be adopted. On the other hand, politicizing stuff is, you know, I don't know, turns it into, like, it's like, you know, you don't want relying parties to fear signaling a political persuasion based on which digital IDs they choose to support or something. So we'll see how this plays out.

Riley Hughes: I'll be really interested in watching this. Okay, my next prediction is that one additional state will join my lovely home of Utah in its alternative push to mDLs. So Utah does have an mDL. I have it here on my phone. But Utah is planning a, what they call state-endorsed digital identity, which is a state-issued digital ID as opposed to a DMV-issued driver's license, right? And it's a sort of a foundational identity that, you know, is issued by the state, but they would prefer the term endorsed by the state, right? So it's not like the state comes up with your identity; you already have one. The state simply stamps and endorses that identity and gives it to you. It's very much more inspired by the decentralized identity crowd, and I think that my prediction is that this will start a cascade of fragmentation because it reminds me a little bit in 2019 when we started Trinsic. Everybody agreed that W3C verifiable credentials were the thing. It seemed like consensus, right? And there were a couple different standards.

Riley Hughes: There were—it's true that there was not only one, but they were at least written into the W3C specification. But then as soon as some defectors started splitting, then this prisoner's dilemma scenario kicked in, where, like, if everybody agrees on the standard, then nobody has an incentive to defect. But then if, yeah, Microsoft— you know, Microsoft starts doing something different than what Mastercard was doing, then all of a sudden Workday decides to do even a different thing, and Block, you know, TBD decides to do a different thing. And pretty soon you're in the space we're in now, where there's 20 different verifiable credential standards or whatever, and there's not a single consolidated sort of set of standards that everybody agrees on or is implementing. And I fear a similar thing will happen here. So this is another prediction I hope doesn't come true, but alas, I think that's my prediction. Okay, predictions for Europe. My first prediction here is that only half of the EU member state countries will meet the end of 2026 deadline for EUDI.

Riley Hughes: I think this is another way of saying this is, you know, half of EU member state countries won't have an EUDI Wallet by the end of the year. This is also not based on puns of insider information, right? I'm not talking to the, you know, administrators of every EU member state country and sort of tallying up who is likely to launch by the end of 2026 or whatever. This is based on a broad pattern recognition for, like, for example, when the Australian states were supposed to launch. Their mDLs, and when they actually are. When the U.S. states were supposed to launch with the DASH 7 remote verification specification, and when they actually are, right, and just how long these things tend to take. Yeah, this is my prediction, and I expect that questions like, who can verify these credentials? How will registration happen? Will reciprocity exist between different countries' registration processes for relying parties? And does that mean that every international relying party is just going to go get registered in Malta or something because it's, like, got a, you know, less stringent process?

Riley Hughes: Or, you know, how will integrators or non-governmental issuers get paid? Or non-government wallet providers get certified? Or the business model for them, right? I think there's going to be a lot of questions that remain unanswered, and it'll be interesting to see sort of how that plays out. My next prediction is that five EU countries will have at least 10 million users of EUDI wallets. Or if they're a small country who only has 10 million people to begin with, then I'll say sort of greater than 80% adoption in those scenarios. So, and the reason for this is because my bet is that Europe is a fantastic place to focus on eID adoption, but not for the reason that most people think. I think the majority of EUDI wallets with a lot of users will be existing digital IDs, such as itsme in Belgium or, you know, products like that, that already have a lot of users and that upgrade their solutions and their systems to— to the EUDI specifications. And I think the consensus view is that, you know, we should wait for EUDI to come, right, and sort of adopt EUDI when it's out there.

Riley Hughes: And I think that people with that point of view will lag behind people who instead take this contrarian position that I'm making here, which is that the digital IDs that are already out there and already being used will, number one, continue to be used even after the EUDI Wallet comes out. I mean, there's going to be some, like, some period of time where those existing IDs remain relevant, on the one hand. And then on the other hand, many of those existing digital IDs will simply upgrade their standards to EUDI. They'll, you know, issue new credentials, they'll ask users to download the app, and bada bing, bada boom, before users know it, they have a compliant wallet. And if you've integrated it now, then, you know, you'll get the benefit of it now instead of waiting for a year and a half for all this to come to be. So that's my prediction here. And this is pretty compelling, right? I mean, 50 million users with this kind of a wallet, that is a massive growth of standards-based, user-centric kind of wallet applications versus where the world is today.

Riley Hughes: So if this comes true, this will be the best year in history for privacy-preserving digital ID. Okay, my next prediction is that in the UK, private reusable ID solutions will be the dominant solutions. As even as the government kind of relaxes its rhetoric about the digital ID being mandatory or compulsory in order to work. So my prediction is basically twofold here, that number one, that rhetoric will cool off and that, you know, the reality of this digital ID will not be that it's actually compulsory or whatever. And secondarily, that, like, the damage has already been done and this is a great opportunity for private sector companies to enter the picture, be certified under the DIATF framework. And I wanted to make the prediction that government services would begin to accept DIATF-certified reusable ID wallets. I think that's a bit of a stretch, but, I mean, maybe I should have made that as the prediction here, but I do think that's probably a bit of— a stretch.

Riley Hughes: But I do think it's likely that private reusable ID companies are the dominant form of reusable ID in the UK, and that if you are looking at accepting digital IDs in the UK, you'll need to consider private reusable IDs in your strategy, not just the GovUK Wallet or things like that. Okay. Beyond North America, beyond Europe, let's talk about the rest of the world and some more general predictions here. My first one is that every identity company is going to be supporting digital IDs. I think that is not even a prediction. That's just an inevitability. But the prediction is that the digital ID, or the sort of KYC, IDV, IAM-type platforms that have strong orchestration capabilities will win the sort of big, important deals in the space. So this is things like biometric matching, address verification, fallback document verifications, video IDV, risk signals, and behavioral biometrics, right? Like all these other tools that companies may want to bring to bear in the world of digital IDs.

Riley Hughes: I mean, I can say that these wallet-based and, you know, verifiable credential-based solutions are not the end-all, be-all for ID verification or KYC. They do not, by themselves, solve for all use cases. Real relying parties, right, like cross-border, like a Robinhood or Airbnb or, you know, these types of companies, they will need other solutions brought to bear to bolster the areas where digital IDs maybe don't fully meet their requirements in a given scenario. And so the IDVs that have strong product execution on orchestrating digital IDs alongside traditional forms of ID verification are going to be in a very good position. Okay, my next prediction is that 50% of mDL adoption globally will be in jurisdiction-specific apps. So by mDL here, I mean, you know, ISO standard digitized driver's licenses, right? So I mean not necessarily mDoc, not necessarily all verifiable credentials that you can imagine, but specifically mDLs.

Riley Hughes: And today, when we do a breakdown of the number of mDLs that are issued out in the wild, 50% of them are issued to OEM wallets like Apple, Google, Samsung, and 50% are issued into the 20-something, you know, jurisdiction-specific wallet apps in these various states, countries, etc. So right now the breakdown of mDL adoption is 50-50. My prediction is that by the end of 2026, despite a lot of growth, the breakdown will still be 50-50, right? So I think sort of the reason that that maybe matters for you is if you want to offer If you want to accept users from, you know, whatever they have, you'll probably want a strategy beyond Apple, Google, and Samsung. Yeah, that's, I guess, my prediction there. And at the same time, my prediction is that Google Wallet will be the number one ID wallet on Earth by adoption by the end of the year. And I think, like, you know, this is, like, maybe not that bold of a prediction, because if you look at Android adoption, you look at the defaults, consider global expansion, right?

Riley Hughes: Google has been very involved in the EUDI stuff, and they support this, you know, in Germany, an age verification credential from a bank, for example, you know, from things like that, all the way to mDLs in the U.S., all the way to their ID Pass credential, which is a derived credential from a passport chip. I think it's very likely that Google Wallet is the number one wallet on Earth in terms of the number of credentials and users. And again, this is not actually maybe that bold, because what is, you know, if you think about what is the number one ID wallet on Earth by adoption today? I mean, it maybe depends on how you define ID wallet, right? But, like, would it be ID.me in the U.S. with 70 million, you know, strongly verified users, 130 million more broadly kind of accounts or whatever with some form of credential in them? It depends on how you define that, you know. But yeah, that's the prediction. Okay, we're getting close to the end. These last few predictions here. I think I already have that one, right?

Riley Hughes: Yes, I have the same slide twice, but I wrote it in different words, it looks like. All right, well, that saves us one slide. The next prediction is one billion new people, so people who don't currently have the ability to get access to a wallet-based ID will get access or be eligible for a sort of wallet-based digital ID thanks to biometric databases moving in the direction of user control. Right, so I'm thinking places like, I mean, Ethiopia now does offer a— wallet-based digital ID that Trinsic supports, and this is sort of how this came about, right? It was sort of, they had a biometric government registry of their citizens. They then offer a wallet app to consumers to basically sort of democratize ownership of that and allow consumers to share that information in a more, you know, user-centric way. The same thing is happening right now in a variety of other countries.

Riley Hughes: And, you know, to varying degrees, I don't know if you would really say that people in the Philippines currently are eligible for a wallet-based ID, given that the eGov app in the Philippines isn't exactly—you can't exactly sort of share your credential from that app in a standardized way or in a remote verification kind of a scenario very easily without calling back to the government source. So, but I think 2026 is the year where that will happen, right? And so there will be these very populous geographies that get some sort of wallet-based ID access, and that the number of people who are eligible for digital IDs will skyrocket. I think this is my last prediction. Let's see. Yes, my last prediction here. So get your Q and As ready, and this is probably the spiciest prediction of them all. But my prediction here is that in 2026, privacy advocates and the push for Maximalist privacy posture with respect to digital IDs will have a net negative impact on privacy. So, in other words, the advocating for more privacy will result in less privacy.

Riley Hughes: The reason that I am predicting this is because what I have seen in my own state of Utah and elsewhere around the world is that a focus on perfection with respect to privacy, in a maximalist point of view here, ultimately results in less progress for digital IDs. Part of that is because people are not educated on how these things all work, and so there's a fear, there's a distrust, probably rightfully so, of these digital solutions and of their privacy. And so, you know, there's hesitancy there. In the meantime, what that means is that, you know, people don't get to do selective disclosure and share only the attributes that are relevant for that scenario. Instead, they need to take a high-resolution photograph of their most sensitive government documents, a liveness biometric selfie, you know, video that is sent off to third parties for processing, retention for who knows how long, potentially years for fraud prevention purposes. Maybe they save your biometric template for deduplication purposes, and they maybe train their AI model on your image of your document or something.

Riley Hughes: I mean, this is pretty standard stuff. It's not like those things are inherently wrong intrinsically. But if you're looking at it from the lens of a privacy point of view, the net impact of Allowing users to use a digital ID versus the status quo of picture of plastic ID, the digital ID is far superior from a privacy standpoint. And I think, like, regulators will fill the gap here in geographies like, you know, Italy and Brazil and, in some ways, the U.S. and in some ways, you know, a variety of other countries. Using your eID for certain things, like in Italy, using your SPID for gaming and gambling, for example, is explicitly allowed and, like, sanctioned by the regulator of that industry, which sort of facilitates adoption in that space. And so I think while— so I think, you know, regulators will fill the gap here to the extent that it needs to be, right? In, for example, in scenarios where it's like in the gambling industry, like, you shouldn't be fully anonymous or something, right?

Riley Hughes: And so the regulator will say, like, here you go, here's the things that you should do to accept users here and fill the gap there. That said, I do think the privacy— advocating for privacy is good, and it does push existing eIDs to adopt stronger privacy practices, which is, on balance, a very good thing also. So both things are true. But my 2026 prediction is, as it's stated here on the slide, that doesn't mean that it'll be net negative impact over the long term, I guess is what I'm trying to say. It just means that it would be net negative impact in 2026. Okay. Those are our predictions. So, if anybody wants to sort of, you know, put all these predictions on Polymarket, and we can start Prediction Market or, you know, betting on this stuff, then, you know, we can all use our digital IDs to onboard into Polymarket and, you know, KYC there and whatever, and start, you know, see what we all think about it. But anyway, I'll pause here. It's, I think, time for the Q&A.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Great. Thanks, Riley. There's a few questions in here, so I will kind of tee a few of these up. And if other people have questions, again, we have some time, so feel free to put them into the Q&A, and we'll try to get to as many as we can. First question here is about security, which is a question that we get kind of frequently. Basically, emerging technologies like a digital ID or an mDL maybe have, like, a less proven security model, or there just aren't as many out there. It hasn't been in the wild. So do you think that we're going to see a lot of, like, new types of attacks or fraud vectors on these new eIDs, or how do you see that comparing to, you know, fraud and attack vectors in existing identity verification processes?

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, this is an interesting question. This is a good one for a predictions webinar because I don't know, so I'll just have to predict, right? Best guess kind of thing. I think it's very likely that the assumption behind the question is true, that any new technology or any new solutions have new attack vectors and elements that are unproven or still being worked out or whatever. And I don't think it's possible to have something where every security implication is all worked out unless you deploy it and, like, battle test it against the world or something, right? So I think this is, like, expected. And so my prediction here is that, my prediction here is that in 2026, Digital IDs will be used more as a good signal for good users than as a preventing bad users, if that makes sense. And the reason I think that is because most digital IDs, I mean, you can usually kind of dial this in with your level of assurance that you want to set for accepting digital IDs, at least through Trinsic. But the level of authentication into a digital ID is relatively strong.

Riley Hughes: And so it's a pretty good signal on, you know, if you use your mDL from your Apple Wallet or something, that's a pretty good signal that you are the same user that enrolled in that digital ID and that the enrollment was pretty strong as well. So that's a good signal that you are a good user. If you are a bad user, I don't think you'll try that. I don't think necessarily, I mean, I think it's, like, not scalable. It's much harder to kind of attack that vector, like the digital ID vector, at scale. So I think in 2026, the primary form of fraud will still be sort of, Oh, I don't have a digital ID. Let me try to go through the other way, and then there's sort of many, many more gaps and, like, larger gaps in that world than there is in the other one. The bar is much lower, I think. But it's a really good question. That's just my prediction.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Yeah, great question. So, yeah, keep them coming. If others have questions here, I think one that's maybe a quick one was just a clarification on Apple Wallet expanding into Canada. Functionality may be limited in some cases due to concerns. So, yeah, yeah.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, my prediction about Apple Wallet was that it would expand into Canada. And what I mean by that, I should have probably clarified and been more specific. What I mean is that Apple Wallet will begin supporting new ID cards in Apple Wallet, not necessarily payment cards, new ID cards such as, I don't know, like a provincial ID or a digital driver's license, an mDL, in at least one jurisdiction within Canada in 2026. Again, it's a bit of a long shot. I have no evidence that that's true. It's just I kind of wanted to throw in a few long shot predictions here, and so that was one of them. You know, an alternative prediction would be something like, you know, Apple Wallet goes into the UK or Apple Wallet goes into Australia, right, which are other geographies that are supporting the mDoc specification and that are issuing into their own wallets or whatever. So it would probably be a more reasonable prediction to look at probably either the UK or Australia, but I wanted to be a little bit bold today, so I went for Canada.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Another question here is related to using a digital ID. Basically, you know, how do you keep track of bad actors or fraud with a digital ID, given that there are, there's a lot of push for, you know, like anonymization or not retaining data, and sometimes those things come in conflict with regulation, where you need to know from a, you know, financial crime perspective who is moving money, you know, on and off of a platform or into something like that. So I guess if you want to speak a little bit just to, you know, how that changes with the digital ID, how it's, you know, more privacy-preserving than current status quo.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that's a good question. And one of the, like, the specific language used in the question is basically, how is this, you know, going to work if the system is meant to be anonymized, right? And I think that when we talk about privacy preserving, anonymous or anonymization typically comes up as, like, an assumption about what that means. But I think that actually privacy is not about being anonymous. It is about proving who I am when I want to prove who I am. It's about control. It's about borders and boundaries and control. So I do want my bank to know it's me when I call them, right? I don't want someone else to be able to call my bank and just be able to, like, know my bank balance or something. That's not—I don't want that. I want to be known and prove it's me, you know, when I want to prove it's me, right? So what I think the key is with these digital IDs is that they're not exactly meant to be anonymous per se, although they can be in scenarios where anonymization is appropriate.

Riley Hughes: But rather, they're meant to only share the relevant data for that transaction specifically, right? And so, in other words, in order to comply with regulation, in order to prevent fraud, in order to do business, you'll need to know information about that user. And that information, if it comes from a digital ID, has some level of trustworthiness associated with it. And that's totally within the realm of how these digital IDs work. For example, you can still sort of deduplicate users. You know, you can do a biometric match in real time to make sure that this is the right user for this credential. You could store that in a safe way or whatever, but then when the user comes back, still be able to kind of address that. So there's things like that that you can do that would, you know, that I think these things are very compatible, right? Regulatory compliance, collecting the data you need, and also privacy-preserving digital IDs. These all work together.

Zack Jones: Awesome. All right, well, we have just three minutes left and some questions that will certainly take more than three minutes to answer. So let's see if there's one more maybe we want to fit in before the top of the hour here. I do think, I think let's talk a little bit about levels of assurance or standardization efforts, you know, globally, right? So you have like EU frameworks and you have trust frameworks being, you know, stood up in Canada and New Zealand and other parts of the world. So I'm curious, Riley, just to get your thoughts just on the first part of the question around greater standardization on the idea of like a level of assurance when presenting a digital ID. This is a question that comes up a lot, and curious how you think about that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I think, I think that right now every— digital IDs are fragmented in more ways than one. They are fragmented in terms of the standards that are used technically. They're fragmented in terms of the standards that are used to express the level of assurance associated. In the UK, there's a really robust and sort of honestly complicated regime that governs level of assurance, right, with GBG 45. In the UK, there's the NIST framework, you know, IAL with AAL as another dimension on that, which is maybe more simplistic, less expressive, but easier to maybe get your head around or something. And these two frameworks do not map one to one, let alone the frameworks in the EU and Canada and New Zealand and, you know, whatever. So my thoughts around standardizing this, I just, I don't know. I'm not optimistic that these things will just be standardized in some near-term time frame.

Riley Hughes: So, you know, what we do at Trinsic is we sort of try to normalize these things and get underneath the, like, abstraction, the standard, whatever, get into the nuts and bolts of, like, how is this done under the hood, and then map that to a common framework that we express. So for each digital ID, we basically put a Trinsic level of assurance score on it, which is an informational kind of, you know, a bit of information about that digital ID. And then we also attach the sort of issuer-professed or wallet-professed level of assurance in terms of the local framework as well. But yeah, that's a tough one. I don't know what, you know, I think I'm not optimistic that will be solved in 2026 here.

Zack Jones: No, there's been some great efforts around mapping trust frameworks to each other, but like you said, it's a complicated thing to reason about on a global perspective. So I think with that, there's a few other ones, but I want to respect everybody's time and kind of get, you know, wrap up the webinar here. We will send out the recording to everybody who's registered. So if you have colleagues that missed it or if you missed a portion of it, you can get the recording via email after this. And if you have additional questions, you can reach us, you know, via email, LinkedIn, Slack, and we're happy to chat more. So thanks, everybody.

Riley Hughes: Thanks all. Have a good one.