Dutch Coalition Agreement 2026: Yivi can deliver on the digital ambitions
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Dutch Coalition Agreement 2026: Yivi can deliver on the digital ambitions

• Yivi Team 7 min read
coalition agreement age verification social media privacy digital sovereignty open source disinformation Netherlands

On January 30, 2026, the Dutch coalition agreement “Aan de slag — Building a better Netherlands” was presented. The agreement contains concrete ambitions for digitalization, online safety and digital sovereignty. In this article we highlight three themes where Yivi can deliver directly: privacy-friendly age verification, digital sovereignty and combating disinformation.

Privacy-friendly age verification for social media

The chapter “Safe and Healthy Online” contains a notably specific requirement:

“An enforceable European minimum age of 15 for social media with privacy-friendly age verification for young people, as long as social media are insufficiently safe.”

The agreement does not ask for arbitrary age checks — it asks for privacy-friendly age verification. That distinction is crucial. Most existing solutions operate in ways that directly contradict this requirement:

  • ID upload systems require users to hand over a copy of their identity document to a commercial party at every verification. Reading an identity document is not the problem in itself — the problem arises when you have to surrender your full ID to every social media platform, every gambling site and every online service. This creates dozens of copies of your identity data at as many parties, each a potential target for data breaches. A full ID upload is not necessary for age verification: disclosing a derived attribute such as “older than 15” should be sufficient.
  • Facial age estimation (AI-based) analyzes a user’s face to estimate their age. This requires biometric data processing and is inherently inaccurate and discriminatory.
  • Digital identity via payment instruments, such as iDIN, ties age verification to the user’s banking relationship. This has multiple problems: iDIN is end-of-life and being phased out, far from all banks are connected — not even all Dutch banks, let alone foreign ones, and you do not want to involve the bank in every age check on a social media platform or gambling site — that creates an unnecessary dependency and a trail of verification moments at the bank.
  • Foreign solutions place control over Dutch citizen data with parties outside our jurisdiction.

None of these methods are privacy-friendly. Yet that is exactly what the coalition agreement demands.

Yivi is the only Dutch solution that delivers this today

Yivi is the only Dutch sovereign player that has a production-used, privacy-first age verification solution ready. This is not a theoretical possibility — Yivi is already used in production for age verification today.

Yivi reads the same identity documents as other solutions — the chip in machine-readable travel documents (passport, identity card) or the Basisregistratie Personen (BRP, the Dutch civil registry) — but converts them into credentials that enable data minimization without sacrificing certainty. From these sources, an “older than 15” attribute is derived and stored in the user’s Yivi app. The identity document is read once; after that, the user never has to share it again.

During verification, the user discloses only this single attribute to the verifier. The verifier receives a cryptographic proof that the age threshold has been met — no name, no date of birth, no document number, nothing else. Whether the user verifies at a social media platform, a gambling site or an online store: the only thing the other party receives is the answer to the question “older than 15?”, not a copy of an identity document.

What makes Yivi truly privacy-friendly is the use of zero-knowledge proofs. This means that even the state — the original issuer of the attribute — cannot trace where or when a user discloses this attribute. There is no central logging, no callback to the issuer, and no way to build a user profile. The user is fully in control.

This is the difference between age verification that violates privacy and age verification that protects it. The coalition agreement asks for the latter. Yivi delivers it. Try it yourself via the Yivi age verification demo.

Yivi is operational — the NL-wallet is not

An important distinction with the European digital identity wallet (NL-wallet) is that Yivi is already operational and can be used today. The NL-wallet is not expected to become available until around 2028. Moreover, the NL-wallet does not offer the highest privacy guarantees: zero-knowledge proofs — which allow you to prove that you meet an age threshold without leaving a cryptografic trail — are requested by the European Union for age verification, but are not part of the current NL-wallet plans. Yivi offers this technology today.

Digital sovereignty

The coalition agreement sets clear requirements for digital autonomy:

“Digital autonomy must be the starting point for government. We choose European digital infrastructure, and systematically reduce strategic dependencies in cloud, data, and critical systems.”

And more concretely on procurement:

“Digital procurement and tenders will be standardized and centralized, steered by security-by-design, zero-trust, sovereignty, open source and supply chain security.”

Yivi meets each of these requirements:

  • Sovereign: Yivi was developed in the Netherlands, originating from research at Radboud University Nijmegen. The technology, code, and governance are Dutch. Yivi hosts everything in the Netherlands on non-BigTech cloud providers.
  • Open source: The entire Yivi stack is open source. Anyone can inspect, audit, and contribute to the code.
  • Security-by-design: Yivi was designed from the ground up with privacy and security as the starting point, not as an afterthought.
  • Zero-trust: The Yivi protocol requires no trust in a central party. Cryptographic proofs replace blind trust.
  • No foreign dependencies: Where other identity solutions run on American cloud infrastructure or depend on foreign vendors, Yivi offers a fully Dutch and European alternative.

The agreement also speaks of establishing a “Dutch Digital Service” with authority to set quality standards, and of reducing strategic technology dependencies. Identity infrastructure is one of the most critical components in that picture. When a country’s identity layer depends on foreign vendors, that is a strategic risk. Yivi offers a sovereign alternative.

Disinformation and online identity

The agreement addresses the growing threat of disinformation:

“We will combat disinformation and online influence operations. We will increase the ability to remove disinformation at European level and use all available means to hold social media platforms accountable.”

Disinformation is fundamentally an identity problem. Fake accounts, bots and coordinated influence campaigns operate at scale precisely because online identity is not verifiable. As long as anyone can anonymously create unlimited accounts, it remains technically simple to manipulate public debate with fake entities.

Online identity verification is a crucial part of the solution. Not by abolishing anonymity — that would undermine freedom of expression — but by giving platforms the ability to verify that an account belongs to a real person, without needing to know who that person is. Verifiable credentials, as Yivi provides, enable exactly this.

AuthentiMark: watermarking based on identity

Yivi is not only deploying existing technology here, but also investing in research toward the next step. Yivi participates in AuthentiMark, a research project funded by NWO (the Dutch Research Council) that focuses on online watermarking based on identity.

The idea behind AuthentiMark is that digital content — text, images, video — can be embedded with a cryptographic watermark linked to a verified identity, without making that identity itself visible. This makes it possible to verify the origin and authenticity of content, and to distinguish manipulated or synthetic content from authentic material.

In an era of deepfakes and AI-generated content, this is becoming increasingly urgent. The coalition agreement acknowledges this explicitly:

“We will tackle (sexual) deepfakes by updating legislation, so that people gain more control over their portrait, body and voice.”

AuthentiMark combines the power of verifiable credentials with watermarking technology to build an infrastructure where the authenticity of online content becomes verifiable — without compromising the privacy of the creator. The idea of digital signatures for authenticity is elaborated in the academic article The Authenticity Crisis by Bart Jacobs. This is exactly the type of solution needed to structurally address disinformation.

From agreement to implementation

The coalition agreement formulates ambitions that require concrete technical solutions. For privacy-friendly age verification, the wheel does not need to be reinvented. The technology exists, is proven in production, and is available — today.

Yivi can deliver on:

  • Privacy-friendly age verification for social media and online platforms — as the only Dutch sovereign player with a production-proven solution
  • Sovereign digital identity infrastructure that meets the requirements of security-by-design, zero-trust, open source and supply chain security
  • Combating disinformation through verifiable online identity and research into identity-based watermarking via AuthentiMark

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