Case Study - Infrastructure for sovereign data marketplaces
Haven helps industry consortia run secure, specialized data marketplaces where participants keep control of their own data and prove trust through verifiable credentials.
- Client
- Haven
- Year
- Service
- Trust Architecture, Identity & Verifiable Credentials
Overview
Haven is a vDL-born venture for sovereign data marketplaces: environments where industry consortia can exchange specialized data without handing control to a central platform.
The model is deliberately federated. Each participant runs its own warehouse instance. The consortium keeps the brand, governance, and shared rules. Access is governed through identity and credentials instead of informal promises, manual gatekeeping, or irreversible platform lock-in.
The promise
Haven optimizes and expands digital supply chains by providing the infrastructure that enables industry consortia to run secure, specialized data marketplaces.
- Self-Sovereign Identity
- Verifiable Credentials
- Trust anchors
- Sovereign data marketplaces
- Gaia-X alignment
Self-guaranteeing promises
Instead of merely saying customers keep sovereignty, Haven's architecture is designed to guarantee it. Critical data remains available to the participant and marketplace access depends on verifiable claims, not on trusting a central operator to keep a policy unchanged.
Trust anchors
A consortium or industry association can operate as the trust anchor: managing membership, shared rules, and role definitions while participants keep control over their own assets.
Verifiable credentials
Credentials make permissions, claims, and access rights auditable. Participants do not just claim they meet a requirement. They can prove it cryptographically.
How the trust loop works
| Step | What happens | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Join | A participant is onboarded by a trust anchor. | The consortium controls membership and governance. |
| 2. Prove | The participant receives credentials for roles, permissions, or capabilities. | Access decisions rely on portable proof, not informal trust. |
| 3. Publish | Data products stay connected to participant-controlled infrastructure. | Sovereignty stays with the organization that owns the data. |
| 4. Access | Marketplace access is granted when the required claims verify. | Collaboration becomes auditable and repeatable. |
Built from ENVITED-X experience
The technical foundation comes from years of work with ENVITED-X and ASCS e.V. on decentralized data governance for automotive simulation. That work made the problem concrete: companies need to collaborate, but they cannot give up control of sensitive assets.
Haven generalizes that pattern. The first use case is automotive simulation data, but the architecture is meant for any industry where organizations need shared markets without surrendering control.
Technical foundation
Haven builds on standards and tools already present in the trust technology stack:
- did:ethr for decentralized identifiers anchored in Ethereum-compatible infrastructure.
- Verifiable Credentials for portable, auditable claims.
- Gaia-X alignment for interoperability with European dataspace requirements.
- LinkML credential schemas for structured, machine-readable data models.
The result is infrastructure that lets a consortium define who can participate, which claims they must prove, and how marketplace access should work - while leaving data sovereignty with each participant.
Team and lineage
Haven is led by Felix Hoops, Venture Lead and TU Munich PhD in Self-Sovereign Identity for B2B. Roy Scheeren, Senior Developer at vDL, contributes implementation depth from vDL's identity and marketplace work.
For vDL, Haven is the studio model in practice: identify a real trust problem, build the infrastructure, validate it with industry partners, and turn it into a focused venture.
- First deployment context
- ASCS
- Core identity architecture
- SSI
- Identifier layer
- did:ethr
- Dataspace alignment
- Gaia-X