European
Dataspaces

European Data Spaces are structured ecosystems designed to facilitate secure, trusted, and seamless data exchange across organizations and sectors within Europe. Initiatives such as Gaia-X and Catena-X exemplify these collaborative environments, aiming to break down data silos, enhance interoperability, and ensure compliance with European standards and regulations.

At their core, European Data Spaces prioritize sovereignty, transparency, and trust, enabling businesses, public entities, and research institutions to confidently share and utilize data at scale, while maintaining strict control over the access and use of their data assets.

The Trust Problem in Data Spaces

A fundamental challenge facing Data Spaces is trust. Knowing the precise origin of datasets and be certain that shared data has not been changed or manipulated. Equally critical is security for access: organizations need to reliably verify who requests access, confirm their identity and authority, and understand exactly why and for what purpose they seek access.

Without clear governance and verifiable trust mechanisms, data spaces risk unauthorized data access, compromised data integrity, compliance violations, and erosion of participants’ confidence, hindering effective collaboration and limiting the full potential of secure data sharing.

Sphereon’s Trusted Data Infrastructure: Bridging the Operational Trust Gap

Many European data spaces have defined who can be trusted, but they still lack tools to enforce that trust in practice. As a result, key processes like data sharing, verification, and compliance remain vulnerable.

Trust roles may be written down, but they’re often not checked in real time. Credentials are issued, but lack a simple way to know if they’re still valid, if they follow policy, or if the issuer or holder can be trusted.
Recognized authorities are often missing, so there’s no strong anchor for governance or enforcement. And even when credentials exist, they usually lack context, no policy bindings, no revocation, no way to verify them across different parties.

Sphereon solves these gaps by adding the operational trust layer that data spaces need to function securely and reliably:

• Governance is embedded. Sphereon provides a federated tust framework. based on OpenID Federation, that establish clear authority, accountability, and auditability.
• Policies are enforced automatically. Sphereon checks every credential against the rules of the ecosystem before allowing access or data sharing.
• Trustmarks are verifiable. Participants can instantly see who is trusted, and why, based on cryptographic proofs.
• Credentials have context. They carry the policies they depend on, can be revoked, and support trust verification across different parties and systems.

With these capabilities, Sphereon ensures that data ecosystems don’t just define trust, they enforce it. The result: secure, efficient, and compliant collaboration across sectors and borders.

Gaia-X? Pontus-X?

Gaia-X and Pontus-X are closely related European Dataspace  initiatives that both aim to support trusted, sovereign data sharing in Europe, but they serve fundamentally different roles within that ecosystem.

Gaia-X is a European framework that defines the overarching rules, architecture, and governance principles for how federated data spaces should function. It focuses on ensuring that data infrastructure and services across Europe remain interoperable, transparent, and under sovereign control. Gaia-X does not provide software or a ready-made platform. Instead, it establishes the policies, trust models, and certification criteria that guide how organizations should collaborate and share data responsibly.

Pontus-X, is an open-source reference implementation that brings the Gaia-X principles to life. It provides the actual technical building blocks and software components needed to set up and operate a data space. This includes tools for managing digital identities, enforcing data-sharing policies, negotiating contracts, and ensuring compliance with Gaia-X governance rules. While Gaia-X explains what the system should look like and why it’s important, Pontus-X shows how to build it and run it in practice.

In essence, Gaia-X defines the blueprint for sovereign data exchange, while Pontus-X delivers the tools to construct and operate data spaces in line with that blueprint. The two are not competitors but complements—Gaia-X sets the standards, and Pontus-X helps implement them.