Announcements & the public record

Who is this agent? Who operates it? What is it allowed to do? And can you verify all of that without a central platform watching every interaction?

We just published The Agent Identity Landscape, September 2026: a comparative analysis of trust approaches for autonomous actors, by Fabrice Rochette (Verana Foundation) and Ariel Gentile (2060).

The paper maps six deployed families of solutions:

The Verana Foundation speaks at the Eclipse Foundation's Models4Privacy Interest Group webinar on September 17: Why AI Agents must have their own identity?

AI agents are starting to transact, negotiate, and act on our behalf. Before each interaction, three questions need verifiable answers: Who is this agent? Who operates it? What is it allowed to do?

Answering them through a central registry creates a privacy trap: every interaction becomes linkable, detectable, and disclosable to a central observer. A decentralized public trust layer answers them instead, with verifiable credentials and cryptographic trust registries, so that trust can be verified locally, with no platform watching.

The Global Digital Collaboration Conference opened on September 1 at Palexpo Geneva: three days with thousands of builders, standards bodies, and policymakers from all over the world working on digital identity, wallets, verifiable credentials, and trust infrastructure.

The Verana Foundation was there for all of it, meeting the people building trust registries, sovereign digital identity, and trust for AI agents, and showing how a public trust layer connects ecosystems across borders, live on our playground.

On Day 3, Verana joined the session Decentralized Trust Mechanisms for Serving Local and Global Needs: how trust can be established, managed, and verified across ecosystems without a single central authority, through verifiable credentials, cryptographic trust registries, did:webvh, DeDi, OpenID Federation, Public Key Directories, and KERI, and how these mechanisms can serve Digital Public Infrastructure and cross-border collaboration.

Verifiable credentials are becoming a reality, and more and more governments are adopting them for the digital identity of their citizens and the registries of their businesses. The question that defines everything else is not whether to adopt them, but on what infrastructure to deploy them.

When digital identity is deployed on a proprietary platform, every service keeps its own copy of the citizen's identity and of the business record. Nothing interoperates outside the platform, license costs climb, and the technology decisions no longer belong to the State but to the vendor.

Vendor lock-in is not just a technical problem. It is a cession of sovereignty: whoever controls the platform controls the rules, the data, and the continuity of the service.

Meet us at the Global Digital Collaboration Conference, September 1 to 3 at Palexpo Geneva.

GDC brings together thousands of builders, standards bodies, and policymakers across digital identity: wallets, verifiable credentials, trust frameworks, technical standards, and regulation. Exactly the conversations the internet's missing trust layer needs.

We will be there to talk Verifiable Trust: public trust registries, sovereign ecosystems, and how services and AI agents identify and trust each other before the first message. If you are building wallets, trust frameworks, or agentic AI, come find us.

▶ Watch the video on YouTube (3 minutes)

Verifiable credentials are becoming a reality. The groundwork is laid: issuer, holder, verifier, one trust triangle, standardized at W3C, the OpenWallet Foundation, Trust over IP, DIF, and ISO. And implementations are arriving in every sector: eIDAS 2.0 and the EUDI wallet, mobile driving licenses, agent payments, legal-entity identifiers, travel, supply chains, content authenticity.

A repair technician rings your doorbell. The badge looks right. The uniform looks right. And nothing about either can be checked.

That moment — a stranger at your door, asking to be let in on the strength of a logo — is where the Vesta use case begins. It is now published in the FIDES Use Case Catalog, and every step of it runs live on the Verana testnet, where you can play it end to end with a real wallet.

Vesta Appliances (demo) is a fictional Swiss manufacturer — quality home appliances since 1985 — with a problem every real brand shares: customers cannot tell the difference between Vesta and anyone dressed as Vesta.

Rebuilding trust is not just about technology. It is about who holds the power.

Verana is rebuilding digital trust for an era of AI agents, identity theft, and opaque online governance. But a trust layer for the internet cannot be owned or controlled by any single party. If it could, it would simply reproduce the problem it set out to solve: a web where a handful of gatekeepers decide who and what is trustworthy.

So Verana is built on a deliberate separation of powers, carried by two independent institutions that check and balance each other.