From Standards to Adoption: The Italian IT-Wallet as an Early Implementation of the European Digital Identity Wallet

The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) is reshaping how citizens across Europe access, manage, and share verifiable credentials. Peer-reviewed work explains wallet protocols, trust frameworks, and adoption barriers, but it rarely links those mechanisms to a measured national rollout. This paper presents an explanatory case study of the Italian digital identity wallet (IT-Wallet), an early implementation of Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, organised around which design and governance decisions co-occur with the national activation path, which trade-offs are visible in the evidence, and which findings depend on the Italian setting. The analysis pattern-matches a priori propositions to legal and technical primary materials, to adoption series supplied by the State Mint and Polygraphic Institute (IPZS), and to a GDPR-compliant telemetry pipeline in the IO application. Between 23 October 2024 and 27 June 2026, more than 12 million wallet instances were issued, including renewals, which is a cumulative total rather than the number of instances still active on the last day of the window. The case reads national wallet adoption through the way the software was released, by setting the embedding in IO, the staged opening, and the reuse of existing infrastructures next to the issuance series, without estimating a cause.