'It Only Works Now In Poland'

Her favorite exhibit is Poland. The government super-app mObywatel has 12 million users, a base that doubled in 30 months. "But it only works now in Poland," Maslauskaite said. Europe already has plenty of national wallets, in her telling, but "those are local solutions."

Ukraine's Diia app is her other example. "The moment people fled the country, you know it was gone," she said. "You would need to carry your passport." The Polish spinoff Diia.pl counts as a residence permit for refugees, not a passport. India's DigiLocker, a document wallet built on top of the Aadhaar identity system, launched in 2015 and now holds credentials for more than 530 million registered users. Singapore's Singpass covers roughly 97% of citizens and permanent residents over 15. None of these systems talk to each other.

Businesses pay for that fragmentation on every onboarding. "The camera opens with scan your face. Then you would scan your passport," she said of the standard bank signup, a check the customer repeats at the next bank, and the next country, while the firm pays a vendor each time. "There is no point for them paying for the repetitive process," Maslauskaite said. Her model puts a verified, reusable credential on the user's phone and charges for the orchestration behind it. "The wallet is just the output," she said. "The core thing is trust infrastructure." The template is payments. "There are plenty of the local payment methods that Stripe connected into one core infrastructure," she said. Identity providers plugged into her network get paid when a credential is reused: "We are changing the business model, same as Spotify did for music."

'The Project Of Three Years'

The idea is seven years old, Maslauskaite said, and it started inside a bank. Her brother was working at GBG, the London-listed identity verification group, she said, and watched what it took to plug a verification vendor into a bank with branches in ten countries. "It's like the project of three years," she said. Rules change mid-build, technical requirements change, the business changes. GBG, headquartered in Chester, later became a Deverium partner, and today it sits alongside Regula, iProov and Aware on AlongID's list of connected providers.

The build is funded by a €1.97 million grant co-financed by the EU and Lithuania's economy ministry, running from January 2024 through July 2026, plus roughly €1 million of the company's own capital, by her account. AlongID debuted at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2025 and is not yet commercially live. Publicly disclosed pilots include a European neobank, a central bank and Lithuania's Centre of Registers. The first launch, she says, is weeks away: business account opening with an Estonian neobank she did not name.

The customers she describes are not the giants with compliance departments. Small firms "lack expertise in terms of identity verification and regulation and compliance," she said, and "they're not capable of securing digital identity solutions currently." Her example is a ten-person accounting firm that is legally exposed if it fails to verify a client company, its shareholders and its CEO.

'No One Is Trying To Establish The Big Brother'

Asked in the interview whether a bloc-wide identity layer amounts to a permanent government file on everyone, Maslauskaite pushed back. "No one is trying to establish the big brother here," she said. Nothing pools in a central database, she argues. "Everything is on the device and everything is hashed," she said. "We just know the hash." Her blunter point is that the tracking already exists. "You have your passport, you have your social media accounts, you have your Google account, you have your bank account," she said. Between regulators and platforms, "you're being like checked everywhere."

The privacy fight over eIDAS 2.0 was real. While the law was being drafted, Mozilla and Cloudflare fought a provision requiring browsers to trust government-designated website certificate issuers. An open letter from more than 500 security researchers across 39 countries called it machinery a repressive government could abuse. Lawmakers backed down on part of it. The final text dropped an earlier plan for a single persistent identifier attached to every wallet holder. It added a right to use pseudonyms, and services cannot penalize people who decline the wallet. The Vienna-based digital rights group epicenter.works has argued those paper safeguards are not fully mirrored in the technical framework member states are actually building.

"I always think of privacy and anonymity as completely different things," Varun Kabra, chief growth officer at Concordium, said on the On The Margin podcast. His layer-1 blockchain puts a verified-human check behind every account and hides the identity with zero-knowledge proofs.

The public is not sold. In the UK, a petition against the government's proposed digital ID scheme drew nearly 3 million signatures, among the largest in the country's history. When age verification under the Online Safety Act switched on in July 2025, Proton VPN reported signups jumping more than 1,400% within minutes.

Maslauskaite answers with fraud: "how much fraudulent activities are currently happening, how much stolen identities do we have," she said. Stolen credentials feed a crime economy estimated at $51 billion in crypto alone. The risk runs the other way too: in banking, automated risk signals already cut customers off with no human in the loop.

'Behind Every Agent'

The forward-looking half of her pitch is not about people at all. "Behind every agent you would need to verify who's acting," Maslauskaite said. If an AI agent renews her phone contract, she wants the telco to know it acted "on my behalf, not on someone else."

She points to Sintra, a Vilnius-born startup selling AI helper avatars to small businesses, which raised a $17 million seed round in June 2025. American small firms adopt those agents fastest, she argues, because the market is lightly regulated; in Europe there is no accepted way to prove who stands behind one. The institutions on the other side agree the gap exists, which is why most banks block AI agents from touching customer money at all.

Kabra sees the same hole. When an AI agent books a flight, "the counterparty on the other side, the airline in this case, or the ticketing platform, whatever it is, they have no way to verify where a real accountable human is behind the transaction," he said.

"Our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric," Chandler Fang, founder of t54 Labs, said on the On The Margin podcast. His company builds verification infrastructure between AI agents and payment rails. Depositing investor money at a branch, he said, he asked himself "why I never feel anxious or nervous or concerned when I'm deciding to put two million dollars into Chase bank account." Moving the same money into a crypto wallet, "I need to double check, I need to triple check."

Maslauskaite has even floated taxing verified agents as automation eats payroll receipts, so that software workers help fund the social security systems human workers are leaving.

'A Very High Entry Market'

The identity verification industry she is entering generates somewhere in the mid-teens of billions of dollars a year, with 2026 estimates ranging from about $14 billion to $18 billion, and it is crowded: Sumsub, Jumio, Didit and dozens of other vendors sell checks, while wallet-native players like Procivis and Signicat chase the same eIDAS rails. "It's a very high entry market to be in," Maslauskaite conceded.

Her rebuttal to the obvious question, why a startup from a country of 2.8 million ends up as the connective tissue, is to reject the framing. "Our vision is not to become a monopoly," she said. "We're just the mediator, the orchestrator, but not the aggregator."

The gap between the mandate and the rollout does not appear to worry her. "The technology develops way more quicker than the regulation," she said.