Internship : Verifiable Credentials with SDA Registry

Description

You’ll be among the early members of the newly launched ELCA Digital Innovation (EDI) team, contributing to the next generation of Verifiable Credentials (VCs) powered by the Secure Digital Asset (SDA) Registry. This internship sits at the intersection of identity, digital trust, blockchain, and product innovation, and is ideal for technically strong students who also care deeply about the human side of digital identity—how people authenticate, prove who they are, and interact with digital systems safely and seamlessly.
Your mission is to help build a unified infrastructure for digital trust: a system enabling a single wallet to support both custodial credentials (revocable licenses such as tickets or memberships) and self custody assets (transferable digital collectibles, NFTs, and other portable owned-identity artifacts).

You will work on the SDA Registry, which acts as a bridge between traditional issuing systems and blockchain networks. This registry provides tokenization, authentication, signing, revocation, and tamper proof verification at scale—meaning everything you build will be used to power real, high volume, human-centric use cases.

You will collaborate with experts across the ELCA ecosystem—SECUTIX, Digital Agency, Cloud Services, Engineering, Architecture, and Data & AI—and apply EDI’s philosophy of lateral thinking with reliable technology, creatively combining proven identity, blockchain, and fullstack components to build practical trust infrastructure.

This internship is perfect for someone who wants to grow into a technical innovator with product intuition, able to understand not only how digital identity works, but why trustworthy, human-centered identity flows matter.

Objectives
Build and Enhance Verifiable Credential (VC) Flows
•    Contribute to the design and implementation of credential issuance, verification, revocation, and lifecycle flows within the SDA Registry.
•    Help define human centric VC patterns that ensure clarity, safety, and simplicity for end-users.
Develop Backend Services for Digital Trust
•    Build backend components to issue, verify, and manage both custodial and self custody credentials.
•    Ensure reliability, auditability, and tamper proof behavior across the credential lifecycle.
Integrate Blockchain Tokenization & Interoperability
•    Implement tokenization & authentication mechanisms that leverage blockchain for integrity & verifiability.
•    Support interoperability between centralized issuing systems and external blockchain ecosystems.
 
Apply EDI’s Innovation Approach
•    Use BMAD principles to rapidly prototype and test trust workflows.
•    Explore reusable components (e.g., TIXNGO wallet, SDA registry, Souv Tickets, proof of authenticity) and contribute to EDI’s identity/tooling library.
•    Apply ELCA’s innovation philosophy to combine proven technologies from different business units.
Shape Real World Identity & Credential Use Cases
•    Collaborate with Digital Agency, Engineering, and product stakeholders to understand user needs.
•    Translate business and user requirements into scalable, secure, and intuitive identity flows.
•    Document functional components, APIs, and architecture decisions.
 

Our offer
› A dynamic work and collaborative environment with a highly motivated multi-cultural and international sites team
› The chance to make a difference in peoples’ life by building innovative solutions
› Various internal coding events (Hackathon, Brownbags), see our technical blog
› Monthly After-Works organized per locations

Skills required
•    Comfortable coding in Java (Spring Boot experience is great, but not required — enthusiasm to learn is just as valuable).
•    Curious about how digital identity works and excited to explore topics like verifiable credentials, authentication, or secure digital interactions.
•    Interested in blockchain fundamentals and tokenization concepts — no deep Web3 background needed, just a willingness to dive in.
•    Eager to build and experiment with backend services, APIs, and simple trust workflows.
•    Familiar with Git and modern development practices, or motivated to learn them on the job.
•    Open to working with Docker or containerized environments (we’ll guide you if you’re new to it).
•    Comfortable exploring new tools, libraries, and open‑source components as part of rapid prototyping.
•    Motivated to understand how systems stay secure, reliable, and auditable, even if you’re still learning the underlying concepts.
•    Excited about combining different technologies—identity, backend engineering, and blockchain—to build meaningful real‑world solutions.