Publish the first trust story collection

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+---
+title: "Your wallet has a government inside it"
+description: "The credential can sit on your phone while the rules about valid issuers, revocation and recovery remain thoroughly institutional."
+published: 2026-07-14
+editorialOrder: 11
+reviewed: 2026-07-14
+author: "Ana"
+maintainers: ["Ana"]
+status: developing
+featured: false
+homepage: false
+section: "Governance"
+draft: false
+tags: ["wallets", "government", "governance", "issuers"]
+trustPattern:
+  claim: "Holding a credential locally makes identity self-sovereign."
+  trusted: "Recognition still depends on issuer lists, certification, standards, revocation, registries, law, and the institutions that operate them."
+  failure: "Control of the container can be mistaken for control of the meaning and acceptance of what it contains."
+---
+
+A digital credential may live on your phone. You can choose when to present it. The private key may never leave secure hardware. These are meaningful forms of control.
+
+They do not make the credential sovereign.
+
+A university decides whether you earned the degree. A state decides whether the driving licence is valid. A professional body decides whether a qualification has been revoked. A verifier decides which issuers it accepts. A standard decides how the claim is expressed. Courts and regulators decide what happens during dispute.
+
+The user controls a container inside a recognition system.
+
+## Five layers of decentralisation
+
+Calling a wallet decentralised compresses several questions into one:
+
+- **Key custody:** who can use the credential?
+- **Naming:** what binds a key or credential to a meaningful subject?
+- **Discovery:** how does a verifier find keys, issuers and status information?
+- **Recovery:** who restores access after loss?
+- **Governance:** who changes rules and resolves disputes?
+
+A system can be decentralised at one layer and centralised at another. Self-custodied keys may rely on a government issuer list. A decentralised identifier may resolve through a ledger governed by a small developer and validator community. An open-source wallet may be certified by a national authority.
+
+None of these arrangements is automatically wrong. The problem is the adjective that hides their differences.
+
+## Draw the second diagram
+
+For every architecture diagram, draw a governance diagram. Put names beside the lists, standards, emergency switches and exception desks. Mark who can revoke an issuer, force an update, refuse a credential, recover an account and change the rules.
+
+The result may show a reasonable public institution doing necessary work. That is a stronger argument than pretending the work disappeared because the credential moved to an edge device.
+
+Your wallet can be private, useful and user-controlled while still having a government inside it. In a government credential, that may be exactly what gives the claim value. It should also be exactly what the interface makes legible.
+
+### Further reading
+
+- [EUDI Architecture and Reference Framework](https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-architecture-and-reference-framework)
+- [Regulation (EU) 2024/1183](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1183/oj)