Trust between competitors, established in the architecture
Since 2022 we have worked on core components of Catena-X, one of the largest European data ecosystems in the automotive industry.
- Ecosystem
- Catena-X
- Timeframe
- ongoing since 2022
- Role
- Software architecture
Starting point
In the automotive supply chain, independent companies exchange sensitive data: manufacturers, suppliers, service providers. It covers carbon footprint, part provenance and quality records. A central platform almost inevitably fails at this: no company hands control of its own data to a central authority, and GDPR and trade secrets require traceable control over who sees what, and under which conditions.
Approach
Shared responsibility for several core components in the ecosystem. Built as a microservices architecture on Kubernetes, backend in .NET, frontend components in React. The architecture is designed for an ecosystem of many equal participants, not for a single client application.
- Policies: technical building blocks that let each company define and enforce who may access its data, and under which conditions. Data sovereignty stays with the data owner.
- Verifiable Credentials: cryptographically provable identity and authorisation of exchange partners, without a central trust authority.
The components have been in production since 2024. A single metric does not capture the value. What matters is that data exchange between competing companies becomes possible at all in a GDPR- and governance-compliant way, because the trust mechanisms sit in the architecture itself rather than in a checking layer bolted on afterwards.
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