The 2025 article, “The elephant in the European Digital Identity Wallet room: how can service providers get paid?”, raised a crucial question about the EUDI Wallet business model: how will commercial actors in the ecosystem get paid? Without payment, commercial actors won't provide services, or they must rely on government funding, which might not be the ideal situation. This post revisits the issue, exploring what has changed and what has not since the 2025 article was published. The observation is that the elephant is still there but actors try to circumvent it by finding alternative ways of getting paid that can work at least for the short term.
