The vision for EOSC is to transform Europe's research data ecosystem towards a trusted, secure and sovereign common space of high-quality, FAIR research data and related services. During the past year EOSC has made step progress towards its deployment as a federation between data repositories and services of research infrastructures and other scientific service providers. In October 2024, the EOSC EU Node came online, offering its services to an expanding user base and enabling the connection of other Nodes to the Federation, and in March 2025, 13 ‘candidate' EOSC Nodes, including some of Europe's major research and digital infrastructures, joined forces with the EU Node to build a fully operational Federation. In this presentation I will highlight the main milestones achieved during this time and present an outline of upcoming activities towards delivering this vision.