About
The Verida Charter Foundation stewards a shared, open evidence standard for decisions that have to cross organisational boundaries: a portable record of who reviewed something, under what rules, with what authority, with what outcome, and whether it still stands.
Established in 2026, the Foundation is a 501(c)(6) Delaware nonprofit that governs the standards and conformance criteria for Portable Trust Infrastructure (PTI): the coordination layer that lets decision evidence travel across firm, platform, and jurisdictional boundaries in verifiable form.
The Foundation publishes the rules. Commercial implementers build the products that conform.
It serves the shared interest of regulated multi-party markets: insurance, customs, finance, supply chain, and adjacent sectors, where determinations are routinely contested years after they are made, and where the evidence behind those determinations must survive transit across the very boundaries that define the market.
Operating Principles
The Foundation operates under four written principles.
Editorial Independence. The Foundation sets its own research agenda, publishes its own findings, and accepts no sponsorship terms that condition access to research, influence over scope, or pre-publication review by funders. Sponsors are acknowledged. They are not editors.
Open Specification. All standards, schemas, conformance criteria, and reference documents are released under permissive open licences — Apache 2.0 for code, CC BY 4.0 for documents. Any implementer, commercial or not, may build on them without royalty or per-seat licence to the Foundation.
Joint Ownership of Co-Developed Artefacts. Where the Foundation co-develops work with industry, regulators, or academic partners, ownership and attribution are fixed by written agreement before work begins. The default is joint ownership with permissive downstream licensing. The Foundation does not claim exclusive control over work it did not solely produce.
Publication in Full. Programme findings — including those inconvenient to sponsors, to participants, or to the Foundation itself — are published in full. There is no private research channel for paying members. What the Foundation knows, the public record knows.
Governance
The Foundation is in its founding stage. Its initial governance instrument is the Foundation Charter, which establishes the 501(c)(6) purpose, the operating principles above, and the structure of the governing Board.
The Board of Trustees is the Foundation's governing and voting body under the Charter. The first Board is being formed during 2026, drawn from the regulated industries the Foundation serves and from the standards, academic, and policy communities engaged with multi-party trust infrastructure. Trustees are selected in accordance with published independence criteria; sponsorship does not confer a Board seat. Until the first Board is seated, the Foundation acts through its Founding Trustee, and Board composition will be published here as trustees are seated. The Board operates under published bylaws that include terms, recusal rules, and conflict-of-interest disclosures appropriate to a Delaware nonprofit.
Founding Members are the organisations that engage with the Foundation during 2026 to fund, scope, or contribute work to the inaugural programme. Founding Member status is recognised in perpetuity in the Foundation's record. Founding Members may nominate candidates for the first Board of Trustees and hold defined review rights in the first published standards; trustee selection remains subject to the independence criteria above. Organisations interested in Founding Member status are invited to make contact.
Membership is organised into three tiers and five categories (Founding Members, Implementer Members, Regulated Industry Members, Standards Body Members, and Academic/Public-Interest Members), each with defined participation rights in working groups, conformance reviews, and the annual programme of work. Members participate in developing and reviewing the work product; adoption and publication of standards are ratified by the Board following member review. Member commitments are published; member contributions are attributed in the work product.
Senior Fellow & Founding Trustee
Alexander Barrett is the Founding Trustee of the Verida Charter Foundation and serves as its Senior Fellow. He is the author of the Foundation's inaugural research on boundary blindness in regulated multi-party markets and the principal architect of Portable Trust Infrastructure as a published specification.
His work focuses on the conditions under which decision evidence can be made portable across firms, platforms, and jurisdictions without requiring the underlying data to move — and on the institutional arrangements that keep that portability durable across decades of contested decisions. He convenes the Foundation's research programme, leads the formation of the initial Board, and represents the Foundation in its engagements with industry, standards bodies, and regulators.