Cardano's digital ID layer: a path to financial sector business growth

Following the 2025 Cardano Summit, Thomas A. Mayfield from Cardano Foundation shares how a future-proof digital identity layer enables business growth in the financial sector.

We have been discussing digital identity for some years now. What attracted you to this topic, and on what particular use cases/ digital identity developments are you focusing now at Cardano?

What attracted me to digital identity is recognising it as the critical missing infrastructure preventing enterprise blockchain adoption. From healthcare and financial services to supply chains and academics, identity verification serves as the cornerstone of trust. Despite this, existing solutions often fail to provide adequate security and credential control, resulting in frequent data breaches. An estimated 1.3 billion records were compromised in the United States last year alone. Traditional centralised platforms force both individuals and enterprises to relinquish control of their credentials and sensitive information. Existing solutions lack the zero-trust network infrastructure to prevent unauthorised access. While we'd solved trustless value transfer with Bitcoin, I realised we hadn't created identity systems deep enough for real-world business requirements - particularly around regulatory compliance and cross-system interoperability.

At the Cardano Foundation, we’re addressing this gap with open-source tools that let users manage credentials, private keys, and identifiers seamlessly. Veridian is a key part of that work — a privacy-first, decentralised identity platform empowering users with secure, verifiable credentials. It’s designed to meet modern requirements like post-quantum security, interoperability, and compliance, ensuring users retain full control of their data.

The Veridian Wallet builds on that vision. It enables decentralised identifiers and credential management across blockchains and traditional systems, not just Cardano. Through our partnership with GLEIF, we’re bringing Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), which support 80% of global trade, on-chain. Today, more than 500 German companies use our identity layer for AI agent authentication, privacy-preserving data verification, and EU-compliant audit logs. Most don’t even realise they’re on Cardano because great infrastructure should be invisible.

At the events, there are these common themes – identity is broken, or identity systems are fragmented – all of which represent hurdles in achieving verifiable identities and interoperable systems. Do you agree? What are the causes behind these obstacles?

Even traditional finance lacked proper digital identity - the Lehman collapse revealed that contracts didn't specify which legal entity was involved, causing chaos. The core issue is that most systems try to force ‘one identity fits all’ when identity actually needs to have different depths for different contexts. A bank, a machine, and a smart contract have very different identity requirements.

Organisations also misunderstand blockchain's true value - focusing on the technology rather than the verifiable governance it enables.

And finally, the authenticity of the initial data is key. Blockchain can’t fix bad inputs, but it importantly proves they haven’t been tampered with. Success comes when identity infrastructure bridges on-chain governance with traditional systems, quietly powering interoperability in the background. Success comes when identity infrastructure becomes invisible while bridging on-chain governance with traditional processes.

Let’s imagine we have achieved the perfect balance/blend of identity systems/solutions. What are the main benefits for users, the financial industry, and economies in general?

The transformation would be profound across all levels. Users would experience seamless authentication across any system without knowing the underlying technology. The financial industry has the potential to eliminate fraud by using unfalsifiable credentials, while still preserving privacy through selective disclosure. The EU's Digital Product Passport mandate, which requires cryptographic verification for every physical product by 2030, is set to create a market worth USD 1.78 billion that can be unlocked with the right identity infrastructure.

We’re already seeing this in practice. Our partnership with the UNDP’s Tadamon program is creating verifiable digital credentials for civil society organizations across 57 countries. Over 5,200 organisations can now prove their legitimacy on-chain, reducing fraud and improving access to development funding. That’s a strong example of how transparent, interoperable identity can unlock trust and inclusion at scale. Similarly, the DMCC Diamond Certification pilot creates digital twins of diamonds from mine to market, enabling traceable, fraud-proof certification.

For economies broadly, we'd enable programmable supply chains where authenticity becomes algorithmic, and sustainability becomes machine-readable. When identity links to physical objects with guaranteed data integrity, it prevents monopolistic control and enables micropayments that protect smaller players from larger entities.

The 2025 Cardano Summit just wrapped. What did you discuss at the event, and what did you hope to achieve?

At this year's Cardano Summit in Berlin, we focused on how decentralised digital identity is moving from theory to real-world adoption. I spoke alongside Albert Quehenberger of AQ Forensics, Patricia Branco of PCCW Global, and Robby Yung of Animoca Brands to chart a practical roadmap for DID adoption by 2030.

We stressed that Web 2 logins trade privacy for convenience, leading to data monetisation and frequent data breaches, which are systemic issues - 80% of these breaches can be tied to identity compromise. We discussed the fragmentation in current identity systems, integration and user experience hurdles, and the opportunities decentralised identity unlocks for global enterprises.

The Summit was about moving from experimentation to execution. Cardano's technology is already powering verifiable identity solutions that meet enterprise and regulatory standards, support interoperability, and enable trusted machine-to-machine interactions. In this discussion, I aimed to show that digital identity is part of a broader infrastructure that combines governance, compliance, and verifiable trust - the backbone for the next generation of scalable, real-world blockchain solutions.

The timing aligned perfectly with the unveiling of our landmark report with the Blockchain Research Institute, 'Introducing Digital Trust Infrastructure: The Foundation for the New Digital Economy.' The research introduces a framework that shifts organisations from ‘collect and store’ to ‘request and verify’ approaches, establishing governance frameworks that turn technology into reliable, standards-based infrastructure across sectors and borders.

These discussions in Berlin helped bridge developers, institutions, and policymakers to accelerate the next phase of ecosystem growth. As a not-for-profit stewarding one of the world's most resilient blockchains, the Cardano Foundation's role is to ensure this technology remains a public good that can power the infrastructure needs of tomorrow's digital economy.

 

'Decentralized identity is the backbone of any trustworthy digital system. When organizations, governments, and individuals can prove who they are in a verifiable, privacy-preserving way, it changes everything, from compliance and collaboration to how AI interacts with data. At Cardano, we’ve focused on building open infrastructure that works across blockchains and traditional systems, so identity isn’t just theoretical but practical. The real challenge isn’t the technology itself; it’s making sure identity tools fit into existing workflows, legal frameworks, and enterprise operations. Solving that unlocks transparency and accountability at scale. This is the kind of foundation that enterprises and global systems can rely on, and it’s what will enable blockchain to move beyond experimentation into meaningful, everyday use.'

–  Thomas A. Mayfield

About author

 

Thomas A. Mayfield is Head of Decentralised Trust and Identity Solutions at the Cardano Foundation and a PhD candidate researching decentralised technologies, including Edge Layer IoT Trustless Environments. He leads the development of Veridian, a decentralised identity platform for individuals and organisations, leveraging Cardano, KERI, and Trust Over IP’s ACDC. His work focuses on enhancing authenticity, trust, and interoperability across digital ecosystems with quantum-resistant, verifiable, and recoverable identity solutions.

About Cardano Foundation

Established in 2016, Cardano Foundation is an independent, Swiss-based non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the Cardano blockchain ecosystem. The Foundation standardises, protects, and promotes the Cardano protocol while fostering blockchain adoption through strategic partnerships with organisations like Petrobras, SERPRO, Switzerland for UNHCR, and the University of Zurich. With over 100 employees, the Foundation drives initiatives addressing real-world problems from climate action to digital transformation across multiple sectors.