As long as an organisation participates in a single data space, ecosystem-specific trust frameworks work reasonably well: rules are defined, compliance is checked, and trust decisions stay inside a bounded context. The challenge begins when organisations need to operate across multiple data spaces at the same time, a scenario that is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
That is the practical reality Christoph Strnadl will address in his talk, “Architecture and implementation of a cross-ecosystem trust framework: Concepts & Experiences”, at OCX. As CTO of Gaia-X AISBL, and with more than 30 years of experience in IT consulting and technology leadership, he has seen how trust architectures behave once data spaces are required to interoperate.
Many data spaces prioritise speed in their early phases by standardising on a shared software stack. While effective initially, this choice imposes a hard limit later. As Strnadl explains in an interview,
The very same software packages you use, which speed up the implementation in the very first phases, may totally limit, if not block, the interoperability with the next, the adjacent dataspace, which happens to use another piece of software.
In 2026, this limitation becomes critical. Regulatory and industry requirements, such as Digital Product Passports and carbon footprint reporting, are extending trust obligations across entire supply chains. Organisations, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, are increasingly expected to participate in multiple ecosystems spanning different legal and technical domains.
A common response is to mandate a single reference implementation or compliance engine. Strnadl argues this is a mistake.
Standardisation has to be done on the level of protocols and standards, and not on which particular software component everyone has to choose.
His session at the Open Community Experience 2026 introduces ecosystem trust profiles and a federated trust architecture that allow autonomous data spaces to interoperate without a central authority or shared software stack. Trust remains sovereign, while compliance checking becomes automatable across ecosystems.
Crucially, this approach is already in use.
This is operational. This is not, like, fantasy, or theoretical PhD work, or something like that.
The concepts are being demonstrated in a live, cross-border manufacturing use case involving Europe, Canada, and other non-European actors.
At OCX, Christoph Strnadl will break down the architecture behind ecosystem trust profiles and a federated clearing house model, including what worked and what didn’t, in a real multi-ecosystem deployment.
If you are designing or integrating data spaces in 2026, register for OCX 26 and attend this session in Brussels to take away a concrete, standards-based interoperability approach you can apply.
