Global vLEI Hackathon: How Digital Organizational Identity Can Bring Automated Trust and Compliance to Finance and Industry 4.0
Christopher Anz, Research Associate at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, discusses how meeting the urgent need for verifiable organizational identity across the blockchain ecosystem is key to promoting trust and realizing the potential of emerging use cases across finance and Industry 4.0.
Author: Christopher Anz, Research Associate at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center
Date: 2025-11-20
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The winner of the Global vLEI Hackathon in the ‘Industry 4.0 - Industry, Commercial & Finance Processes & Operations’ category will be unveiled at an exclusive international forum on Digital Organizational Identity on December 02, hosted by the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
The Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (FS) is one of Europe’s leading institutions for business, finance, and management education, with strong expertise in finance, economics, management, and data science. FS was also among the first German business schools to establish a dedicated blockchain center, the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC). Since its founding in 2017, the FSBC has served as an innovation and research hub, connecting managers, startups, industry experts, and regulators. Its current focus is on crypto assets, digital securities, the digital euro, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), asset tokenization, and decentralized finance (DeFi).
In this blog, Christopher Anz, Research Associate at the FSBC, explains why robust organizational identity solutions are integral to bridging trust gaps in these emerging digital technologies and ecosystems, and how the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) can unlock new levels of transparency, automation, and interoperability as digital transformation accelerates across the financial and industrial sectors.
What motivated FS to support the inaugural vLEI Hackathon, and how does this partnership reflect its commitment to innovation and knowledge sharing?
We support the vLEI Hackathon because organizational identity is a missing layer of digital infrastructure. Without trusted, portable credentials for firms and their representatives, many promising finance and Industry 4.0 use cases stall at the onboarding and compliance stage. We are convinced, however, that robust identity rails will make developments including tokenization, stablecoin settlement, and – ultimately – a digital euro more usable, safer, and easier to integrate into existing systems.
As a university, our role is in convening practitioners, startups, and regulators to test ideas against real-world constraints. The hackathon format accelerates that exchange and is a natural extension of the FSBC mission – pairing rigorous research with practical experimentation, and contributing open methodologies that others can reuse.
The FSBC researches crypto assets, digital securities, and tokenization. Where does digital organizational identity fit into this landscape, and why is it important?
Organizational identity is the connective tissue across all these domains. Tokenized assets, stablecoin payments, and institutional DeFi all require counterparties that are machine‑verifiable, role‑aware (e.g., treasurer vs. auditor), and policy‑conformant.
A verifiable, cryptographic identity for legal entities closes today’s gap between on-chain automation and off-chain accountability. It reduces onboarding friction, supports continuous compliance (e.g., travel‑rule information, sanction screening), and enables fine‑grained permissioning without sacrificing interoperability.
In the policy debate, this matters because digital money projects – from commercial bank tokenized deposits to a potential digital euro – will only scale if identity, privacy, and compliance are designed together. A mature identity layer lets us move past point solutions toward reusable building blocks for capital markets, payments, and data sharing.
The vLEI offers organizations and their representatives a trusted, cryptographically verifiable identity. From your perspective, what value could this bring to the blockchain ecosystem?
For me, three types of value stand out. First, risk reduction: verifiable credentials anchored to recognized registries make spoofing, impersonation, and counterparty uncertainty far less likely, which is essential for institutional participation.
Second, automation: smart contracts can check credentials at runtime and adapt rights – who may sign, settle, or access data – without manual gatekeeping. This lowers operating costs and improves auditability.
Third, interoperability: standardized credentials travel across chains and technology stacks, which is crucial as ecosystems converge—for example, stablecoin settlement on public rails interfacing with permissioned tokenization platforms.
In short, vLEI‑style credentials create shared trust primitives that make regulated use cases – such as securities issuance, supply‑chain finance, programmable payments – safer and simpler to deploy at scale.
The finalists of the vLEI Hackathon in the ‘Industry 4.0 - Industry, Commercial & Finance Processes & Operations’ category will present their solutions at the Global Forum on December 2 at FS. What kinds of industry challenges do you hope these solutions will tackle?
The common thread that all solutions must address is the need for operational trust. If machines, firms, and people can prove who they are and what role they play, data sharing and settlement can move from bilateral agreements to programmable, auditable processes.
This is why I am excited to see solutions that remove friction from multi‑party industrial workflows and help future-proof the industry. There are many great use cases out there, including: device‑to‑enterprise authentication for secure IoT networks; verifiable supplier attestations tied to digital product passports; automated trade‑document handling with role‑based signing and escrowed data release; and event‑driven payments (e.g., machine‑as‑a‑service) where a credentialed sensor can trigger milestone settlement. And there is also the vital work about a quantum-resilient infrastructure, including identity infrastructure.
Looking beyond finance and Industry 4.0, which other sectors could benefit most from the vLEI, and how might FSBC play a role in driving adoption?
I see near‑term potential across various domains, including public procurement and grants (credentialed suppliers and beneficiaries), healthcare (provider and facility credentials for data exchange), higher education (institution‑signed credentials for diplomas and research data), and energy and mobility (operator identities for charging and ticketing).
The FSBC can help realize this potential across three fronts. First, by providing evidence-based, cutting-edge research and testing it in real-world settings. Second, by contributing to the critical discussion on interoperability, we can help translate standards into practical reference architectures to ensure that identity, payments, and data sharing can work across platforms.
And third, policy. By informing debates around initiatives such as MiCA, PSD3, and the PSR, eIDAS 2.0, and a potential digital euro, we can work to ensure that identity, privacy, and resilience are treated as core infrastructure.
Overall, our focus is clear: build reliable rails that institutions can trust and scale on.
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Christopher Anz is a Research Associate at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, responsible for partner management and ecosystem collaborations. His background spans a banking apprenticeship at Wiesbadener Volksbank, investment advisory at Sam Capital Partners, product management at Adolf Würth GmbH & Co. KG, and political research with Forschungsgruppe Wahlen. Christopher focuses on institutional finance, blockchain, and emerging technologies and holds a B.Sc. in Psychology & Management.
