GLEIF is pleased to have broadened its engagement and participation in Trust Over IP Foundation (ToIP) by becoming a member of the ToIP Steering Committee in March 2024, recognizing the importance of well-functioning governance to the ongoing success of the foundation. GLEIF has been a member of ToIP, as a Founding Contributor member, since May 2020.
With the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI), GLEIF has pioneered a new form of digitized organizational identity to meet the global need for automated identification, authentication and verification of legal entities across a range of industries. By creating the vLEI, GLEIF is now answering to this urgent and unmet need of pioneering a multi-stakeholder effort to create a new global ecosystem for organizational digital identity.
The verifiable Legal Entity Identifier vLEI concept is simple: It is the secure digital counterpart of a conventional Legal Entity Identifier (LEI). In other words, it is a digitally trustworthy version of the 20-digit LEI code which is automatically verified, without the need for human intervention. The vLEI concept is also very much in-line with ToIP Technical and Governance Frameworks as detailed below.
The vLEI Trust Chain demonstrates the ability to chain the issuance of vLEI credentials as well as providing the foundation for the automated verification of vLEIs back to GLEIF which enable cryptographic verification of the identity of an organization back to its validated LEI identity.
vLEIs go further though in being able to cryptographically tie persons to organizations in the roles in which the persons are representing or engaging with these organizations. vLEI Role Credentials combine three concepts – (1) the organization’s identity, represented by the LEI, (2) a person’s identity and (3) the role that the person plays for the organization.
GLEIF works to advance digital trust standards in the neutral ToIP forum through participation in the Ecosystem Foundry Working Group, the Issuer Requirements Task Force of the Governance Stack Working Group and as a co-chair of both the ACDC/KERI Task Force and Technical Stack Working Group. It is here in which the technical specifications of the KERI Suite have been drafted and have begun the process of approval to become published ToIP standards. The KERI Suite of specifications is made up of 3 documents – the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) specification, the Authentic Chained Data Containere (ACDC) specification and the Composable Event Streaming Representation (CESR) specification.
GLEIF also contributed to the development of the ToIP Ecosystem Governance Metamodel and companion guide. The verifiable LEI (vLEI) Ecosystem Governance Framework is based on the ToIP Governance Metamodel.