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Onboarding Guide

Welcome to the Pontus-X data & AI ecosystem onboarding guide. This guide is designed to facilitate your onboarding process to the Gaia-X Lighthouse Data Space, ensuring you have all the necessary tools and information to become an active participant in the Pontus-X data space and the wider Gaia-X ecosystem of ecosystems.

Quick Start - Onboarding in Minutes

Get onboarded to the largest publicly available Gaia-X Data Space Ecosystem in just minutes through our streamlined onboarding application at https://onboarding.delta-dao.com/

The application allows legal participants to join the ecosystem through a simple four-step process without the need to deploy any infrastructure:

  • Register your Organisation - Provide your legal entity information
  • Create or Add Wallets - Create and/or connect your keys for ecosystem interaction
  • Request Onboarding to the Ecosystem - Submit your onboarding request for verification and receive your Gaia-X Credentials
  • Start Using the Ecosystem - Once verified and approved, directly access the portal at https://portal.pontus-x.eu/ or any other ecosystem portal.

Onboarding Requirements

Here’s what you’ll need to get started.

Mandatory (For All Pontus-X Participants)

  • A modern browser (Chrome, Brave, or Firefox).
  • A legal identifier of your Organization (e.g., VAT ID, EORI, or LEI Code).
  • An institutional e-mail address (for domain validation).
  • A private-public keypair (SECP256K1 key).
    • This can be created within the onboarding application itself.
    • Alternatively, you can use any suitable existing wallet solution.

Optional (For Full Gaia-X Compliance)

Note: Full Gaia-X compliance is optional, but natively supported as de-facto standard within the Pontus-X ecosystem. The mandatory steps above are all you need to get started.

For participants who wish to test or achieve full Gaia-X compliance, the following items are typically required:

  • An X.509 certificate with a certificate chain leading to a Gaia-X accredited Trust Anchor.
  • A private RSA key linked to your X.509 certificate and organization.
  • A web-hosting solution to store your participant and service credentials (as JSON documents).
  • A web-hosting solution to store your DID (Decentralized Identifier) document.

What You Can Do After Onboarding

Once you are onboarded, you will be identified as a verified participant in the ecosystem, allowing you to:

  • Discover, consume, publish, and manage data, software, and infrastructure services.
  • Offer federation services to other participants.
  • Manage your digital identity and credentials.
  • Transfer funds (using virtual test currency) and settle business transactions in Pontus-X.

How Onboarding and Identification Work

The Simple Pontus-X Onboarding

Our goal is to create a trustworthy and transparent environment. The onboarding application handles the basic identification for you:

  1. Identity Verification: You provide your legal entity information (like your VAT ID) and a business email. deltaDAO performs a basic validation to verify your organization is a legitimate and properly registered organization. This ensures a high base level of trust in the Pontus-X ecosystem.
  2. Key Creation: You will create a new or add an existing wallet (a SECP256K1 keypair). This acts as your digital signature to interact with the ecosystem.
  3. Registration: Once verified, you are registered in the Ecosystem Registry.

This simple process makes you a verified participant in Pontus-X, allowing you to start building and testing immediately.

Optional: The Path to Full Gaia-X Compliance

For participants who want to achieve full Gaia-X compliance for own service offerings (as defined by the Gaia-X Trust Framework and Complianc Document), a more formal process is needed. This involves creating a set of sovereign self-signed verifiable credentials that prove specific claims about your organization.

This process typically includes:

  1. Creating Credentials: You must prepare self-sovereign credential payloads for your legal identity (name, registration number, address) and for your organizations acceptance of the Gaia-X Terms and Conditions.
  2. Getting Signed: These credentials must be cryptographically signed by your organization and an accredited Gaia-X Digital Clearing House (GXDCH) to be considered valid Verifiable Credentials.
  3. Hosting Credentials: You must host these credentials on your own web server (often in a .well-known directory) or SSI wallet solution.

For testing purposes and get started quickly within the Pontus-X ecosystem, deltaDAO can act as a Trust Anchor to help you create and validate these credentials. This is a primary feature of the "Fast Track" Onboarding Application.

Future Support for Gaia-X Loire

The "Fast Track" Onboarding Application is continuously evolving. A future iteration will include support for creating self-sovereign Gaia-X Participant Credentials, based on Loire (v2) directly within the application, further simplifying the path to full compliance.