QTSP

Origin: composes. The EU created this category, and its supervisory bodies grant the status. Solidus does not hold it and has no plan to seek it independently of a future partner.

A QTSP is a company or organization the EU has certified to provide "qualified" trust services, things like issuing the certificates that back electronic signatures, electronic seals, or, relevant here, the credentials that make up a PID or (Q)EAA inside the EUDI Wallet system. "Qualified" is a specific, legally-defined status, not a marketing word: to get it, a provider has to pass a rigorous audit by an accredited conformity-assessment body, meet the security and reliability requirements the eIDAS regulation spells out, and then submit to ongoing supervision by a national authority in an EU Member State.

Why this category exists

Digital signatures and digital identity only work if somebody is trusted to say "this certificate really belongs to this person or organization." Rather than leave that to each company's own judgment, eIDAS created a formal, government-supervised category of provider who can make that assertion with legal weight: a qualified electronic signature backed by a QTSP has the same legal standing as a handwritten signature across the entire EU. Every qualified provider, in every Member State, is listed on the EU Trusted List: a public, standardized, machine-readable registry anyone can query to check whether a given certificate is genuinely backed by a real QTSP.

How this fits into the EUDI Wallet

Under the ARF, a PID or (Q)EAA issuer's authority ultimately traces back to a QTSP-issued certificate, verifiable against the EU Trusted List. That's the "who do I trust" answer the entire EUDI Wallet trust framework is built on: not a blockchain, not a web-of-trust, but a government-supervised certificate hierarchy that predates the wallet itself by a decade.

Solidus's actual relationship to it

Solidus is not a QTSP and holds no qualified status of any kind. Stating that plainly is the clearest way to see the real difference between Solidus's trust model and the EU's: eIDAS roots trust in a QTSP's government-supervised certificate, checkable against a public list; Solidus roots trust in a did:solidus document anchored on-chain and verified by the network's own BFT consensus. Neither is a shortcut version of the other: they're different answers to the same question, and Solidus's bet is that decentralized on-chain trust can offer an equivalent guarantee at much lower operating cost, with no privileged registrar. That is a bet, not a proven substitute, and it means a Solidus-issued credential has no standing inside the eIDAS trust chain on its own, only a partnership with an existing QTSP could bridge it, and no such partnership exists today.

Check it yourself

The EU Trusted List is public and searchable right now: digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-trusted-lists. Look up any Member State's list of qualified providers: Solidus will not be on any of them, and that's the accurate state of things today.