EU study puts digital identity on research roadmap for next Horizon Europe

The European Union is deciding where to place its next big technology bets.

The European Commission has proposed €175 billion for Horizon Europe for 2028–2034, the EU’s next seven-year research and innovation program. The proposed structure makes Digital Leadership a strategic area within its competitiveness pillar, while separate proposed “moonshot” projects target technologies including next-generation AI, quantum computing and data sovereignty.

The €175 billion is not yet an approved budget. It remains part of negotiations over the EU’s next long-term financial framework. But the proposal establishes the direction: digital technology is expected to be a major part of Europe’s next research investment cycle.

The next question is where within digital technology that money should go.

A study published by the Commission on September 29 provides part of the answer.

Commissioned by the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT), it assesses 12 critical digital technology areas to help shape the digital research and innovation priorities of the next Horizon Europe program. It recommends areas for investment rather than selecting individual projects.

For the identity industry, the findings mark a shift. The study names decentralized identity among emerging fields where concentrated investment could help Europe develop technological leadership. Its research roadmaps also identify digital wallets, verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge technology among areas to prioritize.

The broader Horizon Europe category covering blockchain, distributed ledgers and digital identity received only about €23 million in mapped funding during 2021–2025, less than 1 percent of the total across the digital technology areas examined.

That puts the study’s recommendations in context: identity has been a relatively small part of Europe’s digital research spending, but it is now being identified as an area with future strategic potential.

From the current Horizon Europe to the next one

Europe is not starting from scratch.

The current Horizon Europe program runs from 2021 through 2027 with a €95.5 billion budget. It is organized around three main pillars, with much of Europe’s strategic digital research sitting within Pillar II, Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness.

That includes European partnerships covering Chips, Smart Networks and Services, High Performance Computing, AI-Data-Robotics and Photonics, while cybersecurity is addressed through the Civil Security for Society cluster.

The new study maps Horizon Europe’s 2021–2025 work programs across 12 digital technology areas. Microelectronics received about €2.97 billion, AI €2.57 billion and cybersecurity €616 million.

Blockchain, distributed ledgers and digital identity received about €23 million, the smallest allocation among the areas examined. More than half came through the European Innovation Council and European Research Council rather than the main thematic calls.

The €23 million does not capture all identity-related research because identity also appears within cybersecurity and other areas. But it shows the difference in scale between explicit digital identity funding and investment in neighboring technologies.

The proposed Horizon Europe for 2028–2034 changes the architecture.

It would have four pillars, with Digital Leadership explicitly included within the competitiveness component of Pillar II. Separately, the Commission has proposed large technology-driven moonshots, including next-generation AI, quantum computing and data sovereignty.

Identity is not one of those moonshots.

That makes the DG CNECT study particularly relevant to the identity sector: it indicates which technologies could sit beneath the broader Digital Leadership agenda even without becoming headline moonshot projects.

Identity moves onto the research priority list

Identity appears in two of the study’s research roadmaps.

Its cybersecurity roadmap identifies decentralized identity and digital wallets as mature, high-impact trends to prioritize, alongside post-quantum cryptography and AI-system security.

Its blockchain roadmap identifies self-sovereign identity, verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge technology among R&I priorities.

The study also flags fragmentation among competing identity standards, ID methods and verification protocols. It calls for secure formal verification techniques — mathematical methods for proving that systems and protocols behave as intended — backed by further research.

Privacy is another theme. The study connects technologies such as homomorphic encryption and secure multiparty computation with digital identity, including the EU Digital Identity Wallet.

At the broader strategic level, decentralized identity appears alongside explainable and trustworthy AI, edge AI and cryptography among emerging fields where the researchers say concentrated investment could help Europe develop longer-term technological leadership.

Biometrics gets a passing mention

Biometrics is not itself identified as an R&I priority.

It appears mainly in the study’s analysis of European AI patents, which lists biometric identification and verification as a subarea covering facial, iris and fingerprint recognition and behavioral biometrics. Examples include improved biometric matching and behavioral biometrics for continuous authentication.

The study’s proposed AI priorities are nevertheless relevant to biometric developers. They include trustworthy and explainable AI, AI evaluation, AI safety and security, and edge AI.

Its discussion of trustworthy AI calls for further work on fairness, bias, explainability, robustness and accuracy — issues that also affect how biometric AI is evaluated and deployed.

Europe’s problem is getting technology to scale

The study’s recommendations come against a broader European commercialization problem.

The EU had 20,720 advanced digital technology startups in 2025, with cumulative startup creation roughly tripling since 2015. But only 728, or 3.5 percent, met the study’s definition of scaleups, while 40 had reached unicorn status.

Funding thins out as companies mature. Fourteen percent of EU seed-stage companies reach early-stage venture capital, compared with 21 percent in the U.S. Twenty-one percent of EU early-stage companies subsequently reach growth-stage funding, compared with 38 percent in the U.S.

The study says research agendas are broadly aligned with industry needs. The weaknesses are elsewhere: European research does not consistently reach the global technological frontier, and the EU trails the U.S., China and Japan in patenting across most of the digital fields examined, with quantum and photonics notable exceptions.

Its answer is therefore not simply more early-stage research. The study recommends more support for prototypes, pilots and field testing in real operating environments, stronger industrial participation and better pathways from research to commercialization.

Regulation will shape what gets commercialized

For identity technology, the research agenda will also meet a regulatory framework already moving toward deployment.

Under the revised eIDAS framework, Member States must make at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet available by the end of 2026. That gives immediate relevance to the study’s proposed research around wallets, verifiable credentials, interoperability, privacy-enhancing technologies and zero-knowledge proofs.

The AI Act creates a different set of boundaries for biometrics. It restricts certain biometric applications and places specified biometric uses within its high-risk framework.

That makes research into AI evaluation, bias, accuracy and robustness more than an academic question for biometric developers. New technologies will have to demonstrate performance while fitting within Europe’s rules for how biometric AI can be deployed.

What to watch

The study puts identity on Europe’s future research agenda. It does not guarantee funding.

The real signal will come when the next Horizon Europe work programs turn strategic priorities into calls for proposals: will decentralized identity, wallets, verifiable credentials and privacy-preserving identity technologies receive dedicated funding, or continue competing inside larger cybersecurity, AI and blockchain budgets?

For providers, the direction points toward interoperability, privacy-preserving verification, trustworthy AI and post-quantum-ready cryptography.

For buyers, it means looking beyond individual product performance to how identity technologies integrate with wallets and credentials, minimise disclosure, demonstrate AI accuracy and bias testing, and adapt as European standards evolve.

Horizon Europe could fund the technologies that come next. eIDAS is already defining the identity infrastructure into which some of them may have to fit, while the AI Act is defining boundaries for how some biometric AI can be used.

Article Topics

decentralized ID  |  digital identity  |  digital sovereignty  |  digital wallets  |  Europe  |  identity infrastructure  |  verifiable credentials