In this series, we are exploring different countries' relationship to EUDI developments. In this article: Moldova, a candidate EU member. Do you have a unique point of view of a country's progress, triumphs, and/or obstacles? Reach out to peter@animo.id to share your insights. This article mainly draws on an interview we conducted with Elena Adam, Valeriu Poia, and Artur Reaboi from the Moldovan eGovernance Agency (eGov Moldova). Additionally, desk research was conducted.
Moldova received EU candidate status in June 2022, and accession negotiations were formally opened in June 2024. In parallel, the European Digital Identity Framework entered into force in May 2024, and the Commission adopted the first wallet-focused implementing rules in November 2024. For the Moldovan eGovernance Agency (eGov Moldova), this created the necessity and ambition to develop their own EUDI-aligned version of a National Digital Identity Wallet before the deadline of end 2026, and they didn’t hesitate to get started.
The advantage of existing rails
Along the way, Moldova’s existing infrastructure appeared to be very useful and one of its biggest advantages. Many wallet programs across Europe still have to solve the “shared rails” problem: they lack a common, reusable infrastructure layer that lets the wallet ecosystem authenticate users, retrieve data from authoritative sources, and exchange information across institutions in a standard way. Without that layer, each new wallet function becomes a separate integration exercise. That affects core parts of the national EUDI setup, including how citizens are authenticated consistently, how issuers access trusted public data, and how new issuers and verifiers are added without creating bespoke point-to-point connections every time.
Moldova already has much of that plumbing in their Governmental e-Governance Infrastructure MPass and MConnect. MPass functions as the government’s authentication and access-control service, while MConnect serves as the interoperability platform for real-time data exchange between public authorities. During our conversation, the eGov Moldova team described these platform components as the foundation that makes the wallet operationally feasible.
Having the established infrastructure of MPass and MConnect had huge benefits during the development process. The issuer can pull data from the relevant authoritative source through MConnect, format it, sign it, and deliver it into the wallet. In the team’s telling, that is one reason Moldova can move more quickly than countries where registries and authentication methods remain more fragmented.
Another useful piece is MConnect Events, launched publicly in 2025. It allows connected systems to share changes in registers and databases almost in real time. Changes delivered as events through MConnect Events formed the foundation for eGov Moldova’s approach to revocation handling. When authoritative source data changes, the wallet ecosystem needs a reliable way to reflect that change in credentials and trust decisions. Revocation is a complex issue that each implementing country has to solve in its own institutional and technical context, and Moldova’s existing event infrastructure gives it a practical starting point.
From EVO’s first wallet to a cleaner architecture
Besides MConnect and MPass, another important part of Moldova’s existing infrastructure-story is the EVO-app. EVO is Moldova’s mobile app for public services, and was launched publicly in June 2024. It offers digital documents alongside access to a broader range of public services. EVO’s existing infrastructure is used as the platform for developing their EUDI aligned Digital Identity Wallet.
Unlike other EU Member States that already had a mobile identity app, such as Portugal or Poland, the EVO-app already relied on digital verifiable credentials very similar to the ones required in eIDAS 2. In the interview, the team described that their earlier EVO stack relied on a Blockchain-based approach, using DIDComm and AnonCreds instead of OID4VC and SD-JWT VC/mDoc. However, as this introduced unnecessary complexity and performance constraints, and the EU requires a specific technical profile to ensure interoperability they decided to go into a different direction, pivoting fully to the EU recommended technical standards.
Rather than buying a vendor package, the team chose to build their national issuer, wallet-provider, and verifier infrastructure themselves, while using the EUDI Wallet Reference Implementation primarily on the mobile side. The logic is practical: keep internal knowledge of the core stack, reuse open work where it helps, and retain enough control to guide the ecosystem as additional public and private actors come on board.
Ecosystem design
That steering role came up repeatedly in the interview. eGov Moldova does not see wallet adoption as something that will happen automatically once an app is published. The team is explicitly targeting sectors where daily usage could emerge first, particularly banking and telecoms. They spoke about the national bank as an important partner, about giving verifiers reference implementations in commonly used server languages, and about introducing QR-based authentication flows through MPass so that relying parties can adopt wallet-based login without redesigning their own identity stack from scratch.
In that sense, Moldova’s strategy is as much about ecosystem design as software design. Building in-house is not only a cost decision. For the team, it is also a way to maintain leverage. If they are the institution expected to convince banks, telecom operators, and public bodies to integrate, they believe they need to understand the product deeply enough to explain, adapt, and troubleshoot it themselves.
The same logic also shows up in the interoperability-focused events eGov Moldova is organising around the wallet at Moldova Digital Summit 2026 and in its involvement in the WE BUILD Large Scale Pilot (LSP). The aim is not only to present the product, but to make the model legible to the institutions that will have to plug into it. Moldova is actively convening the ecosystem as part of their implementation strategy.
Certification, trust services, and the institutional hard part
The team was equally candid about what remains challenging. One recurring challenge is compliance. Implementing protocols is only part of the job: certification, accreditation, trust services, and assurance-level requirements introduce a different kind of workload.
At the same time, eGov Moldova is not building every trust component alone. It can rely on a sister government organisation for PKI, HSM upgrades, and the certificates and seals needed for issuing and, eventually, qualified signing flows. In the interview, this came across less as a bottleneck than as a reminder that wallet deployment is institutional as well as technical. The surrounding trust-services capacity has to be in place too.
In April 2025, the Moldovan government presented a new identity card that includes a qualified electronic signature. That does not make the EUDI wallet challenge disappear, but it does suggest that the country’s trust-services and credential infrastructure are moving in the same general direction. The team’s next step, according to the interview, is to connect those pieces into a more reusable remote onboarding and signing environment rather than keep each capability in a separate silo.
In terms of technical challenges, the eGov Moldova team is mainly signalling some challenges in the standardization and interoperability across the EU. During our conversation two broader concerns came up for the cross-border aspects of the EUDI system to really work. The first is format fragmentation. Today’s EUDI ecosystem already has to reconcile ISO mDoc and SD-JWT VC, which we’re seeing successfully in the Large Scale Pilots. But according to eIDAS 2 implementing acts it will also be possible to issue W3C-based credential models. There is a worry that by allowing different formats, the actuality of the cross-border usage will be much less than originally envisioned. The second concern is cross-border identity matching. If different countries do not expose a common unique identifier, then matching on attributes such as name, date of birth, and place of birth may be too weak for real-world use cases. Moldova is far from alone in worrying about those issues.
An intentionally narrow MVP
In the short term, however, Moldova is keeping the scope deliberately narrow. The MVP is a controlled upgrade path from the existing EVO experience: identity document, driver’s licence, and vehicle certificate first, pre-authorized issuance flows, onboarding through the existing national eID scheme, and only one main issuer and verifier environment at launch. Moldova appears to be prioritizing a smaller release that can actually be tested and used.
After that, the next milestone is more ambitious: reusable remote onboarding with liveness checks and a high level of assurance. The team noted that Moldova is in a somewhat favorable position here because passports have carried chips for years and newer internal identity cards also contain chips. That lowers part of the technical barrier for remote proofing compared with countries that still have to wait for more suitable source documents to reach the population.
Why Moldova is worth watching
A lot of countries that are implementing or have the ambition to implement a National EUDI Wallet, can learn a lot from Moldova’s approach and mindset. Its story is not one of perfect readiness or exceptional resources. It is a story about pragmatic sequencing: build on what already works, discard what does not, keep the first release narrow, and use national digital infrastructure as a force multiplier.
For the broader EUDI community, that may be one of the most useful models on offer. Moldova is showing that meaningful alignment with the European Digital Identity Wallet does not require waiting for accession, and it does not require pretending the institutional hard parts are solved. It requires enough infrastructure, enough product discipline, and enough political will to keep moving.
