Open Infrastructure for Portable Trust and Acceptance
The Verida Charter Foundation sets the standards for portable trust — defining the schemas, conformance, and governance that allow verification outcomes to travel between institutions. The Foundation governs the rules. Implementers build the systems.
Data moves.
Trust doesn't.
A file can move. A PDF can move. An API payload can move. But the reasoning, the verification, the approval chain, the compliance status, the authority context, and the acceptance outcome usually do not move with it. Every organization repeatedly rechecks, revalidates, re-audits, re-enters, and re-processes the same information. What is missing is a neutral, governed standard that records who reviewed something, under what rules, with what authority, with what outcome. Not the data itself — the acceptance context surrounding it.
Defines Schemas
The Foundation is developing the open, vendor-neutral schemas, enums, and structures that will define how trust evidence is expressed across institutions.
Stewards the Trust Framework
The Foundation maintains the registries, governance documents, and standards lifecycle that keep the framework neutral, geopolitically balanced, and resistant to capture.
Governs Conformance
The Foundation is establishing the conformance and certification framework that will let independent implementations be evaluated against the standard — independent of any implementer.
Convenes Working Groups
The Foundation convenes industry, government, and civil society in working groups, Advisory Councils, and the ten-stage standards lifecycle. Trust before speed.
Open Standards.
Verifiable Outcomes.
The Foundation is developing the open specification that will define how trust evidence is structured, signed, and made portable. Conformant implementations will produce outcomes that are independently verifiable and not owned by any single party — so acceptance, approval chains, and authority context can travel between institutions.
The Foundation will govern the rules. Implementers will build the systems. That separation is designed in from the start.
Aligned with the standards the
world already runs on.
The Foundation's standards work is designed to interoperate with established international frameworks across identity, trade, customs, finance, supply chain, and sustainability — not replace them. Where mature standards exist, VCF will reference. Where none exist, VCF will define.
Support the Foundation. Strengthen the Standards.
The Verida Charter Foundation's Board of Governors is being established — the non-voting membership body for organizations that financially support the standards work and participate in working groups. Three tiers (Founding, Strategic, Associate). Five categories (Corporate, Government, Multilateral, Standards Body, Civil Society). Benefits scaled by contribution. Governance authority, by structural invariant, reserved to the Foundation. Money buys benefits, not votes.