Japan’s Digital Agency has published detailed technical results from its Japan–EU educational credential interoperability tests, documenting how wallets, issuers and verifiers exchanged credentials across separately governed trust systems.
The newly released verification report and scope document add technical detail to the Japan–EU cross-border wallet pilot. The tests were part of fiscal-year 2025 research, with credential presentation records from December 2025 and issuance tests from February 2026. The work supports the Japan–EU Memorandum of Cooperation on Digital Identities and Trust Services signed in April 2024.
Four scenarios covered both directions of exchange. A credential already held in a Japanese wallet could be presented to a European verifier, and a European wallet could present one to a Japanese verifier. Foreign educational institutions also issued credentials into a user’s home-region wallet, allowing subsequent verification by an institution in that region.
The systems used OpenID for Verifiable Presentations and OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance, aligning their communication with the High Assurance Interoperability Profile. Those protocols respectively govern presenting credentials to a requesting service and receiving a newly issued credential from an issuer.
In the second phase, the partners used trusted lists to authenticate issuer information and electronic seals, rather than relying only on certificates shared in advance. These lists supplied evidence about which organizations and services could be trusted within each framework. Wallet attestations and token-binding controls also formed part of the issuance checks.
The tests issued selectively disclosable, signed credentials in both directions. Presentations were bound to the holder’s private key, with a fresh challenge used to resist replay. A verifier could check the issuer’s seal and selected attributes without receiving every field stored in the credential.
Trusted-list governance is also part of Thailand’s planned verifiable credential framework, which will cover issuer oversight and wallet pilots in 2027. The Japan–EU work tested exchanges between existing separate trust architectures using common technical protocols.
One EU-issued educational credential in the report contained 21 attributes, including a student number and language of instruction. The test flows covered issuing and storing those attributes, then presenting the information requested by a verifier through a holder-approved disclosure process.
Sources: Japan Digital Agency, Verification Results Report
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
