BRUSSELS, 23—The launch of the OpenWallet Foundation was announced late at night on the 23 in Japan time.
The OpenWallet Foundation is an open-source organization under the Linux Foundation that creates common components for “wallets,” digital containers for items such as digital credentials, keys, tickets, and cards. Above the projects that develop individual functions, the organization will have a governing board, a government advisory council, and a technical advisory council.
The initial governing members are Accenture, Futurewei, Gen (formerly Norton plus Avast), and Visa, each contributing 1. General members2 include Amex and others.
OpenWallet is not itself a wallet. Just as Blink is a web browser engine rather than a web browser itself, OpenWallet provides a wallet engine. This will enable companies to create their own wallets.
(source) OpenWallet Foundation
The OpenWallet Foundation also does not develop standards. What it develops is a library containing the functions needed to build wallets—in other words, a wallet engine. Companies can use it to create wallets. If they use the same engine, it is expected to become easier for users to move from one wallet to another.
At an event accompanying the announcement, Nat Sakimura, Chairman of the OpenID Foundation, said the following.
User centricity and privacy are core principles of the OpenID Foundation, the technical standards organization for digital identity. Just as browsers were 15 years ago, wallets are now at the forefront of achieving these principles. But the mere presence of a wallet cannot achieve them. We need trust in the wallet’s code. The transparency provided by open-source implementations is therefore essential, and we look forward to collaborating with the OpenWallet Foundation.
(source) Nat Sakimura
More detailed information about the OpenWallet Foundation is available from https://openwallet.foundation.
Footnotes
- approximately ¥31 million in Japanese yen
- , which pay membership fees of up to approximately ¥10 million depending on company size,
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