Three Layers, One Window: Identity, Payment, and Resolution on Published Timelines
Three pieces of financial and civic infrastructure are being built on published schedules that converge between 2028 and 2030. An identity layer, under Sustainable Development Goal Target 16.9, committing all United Nations member states to provide legal identity for all by 2030, operationalized through a thirteen-agency Legal Identity Agenda Task Force, the World Bank's Identification for Development initiative, and a G20 framework on digital public infrastructure. A payment layer, in the digital euro, whose twelve-month operational pilot begins in the second half of 2027 and whose potential first issuance is targeted for 2029, and whose programmability this catalog documented in Article 40. And a resolution layer, in the European Union's reformed Crisis Management and Deposit Insurance framework, in force since May 2026 and applying from May 2028, under which deposits above the guarantee threshold remain bail-inable by statutory definition. Each layer was commissioned separately, by different institutions, for reasons that are individually defensible and in at least one case addresses a genuine harm affecting roughly 850 million people. This essay does not assert that they were coordinated, and the documentary record contains no evidence that they were. What it asserts is narrower and harder to dismiss: that the three together constitute an architecture in which participation, expenditure, and the adjustment of a depositor's claim all resolve to a single credential, and that no document describing any one layer describes that result. The catalog's method, established in Articles 53 and 54, is to ask what a general capability is general over. Applied here, the answer is available in the primary sources, including a United Nations strategy document that warns in its own text about the linking of personal information across all databases that use these identifiers.