As more digital services are built API-first, powering everything from healthcare to finance to public sector systems, APIs have become the connective tissue of digital sovereignty. These APIs are only as secure and sovereign as the identity systems that govern them.

This talk explores how identity acts as a kill switch in API-driven systems: whoever controls access controls everything. As geopolitical tensions rise, reliance on third-party API gateways, identity providers, or cloud-hosted IAM services introduces new jurisdictional and systemic risk.

We’ll look at:

• Why centralized API identities and opaque access flows expose national or sector-specific digital systems to external coercion.
• The role of open standards and wallet-based identities in restoring control.
• How owning your identity layer and the API authorization architecture around it is key to achieving digital autonomy.