Skip to main content
Version: v4 (next)

Corporations

What is a Corporation?​

A Corporation is the foundational actor of a Verifiable Public Registry (VPR). It is the VPR-level entity that represents an authority acting in the registry: it controls Ecosystems, owns Participant entries, and holds a Trust Deposit. Almost every other entity in the registry — Ecosystem, CredentialSchema (through its ecosystem), Participant, GovernanceFrameworkVersion, TrustDeposit — points back to a Corporation through a corporation_id foreign key.

A Corporation carries VPR-specific attributes and is anchored on-chain by a policy_address account that signs on its behalf:

  • id — the numeric primary key other entities reference as corporation_id.
  • policy_address — the on-chain account that signs transactions on behalf of the Corporation. It is globally unique: no two Corporations share the same policy_address.
  • did — the resolvable DID of the Corporation, globally unique across Corporations.
  • language — primary language tag (BCP 47).
  • active_version — the active Corporation Governance Framework (CGF) version.

(Spec: Corporation Management — non-normative overview, and the Corporation data model, MOD-CO-MSG-1.)

Replaces the old "authority"

In earlier versions of Verana, resources were owned by a bare "authority" account. In v4 that loose notion is replaced by the Corporation — a first-class, governance-capable entity. Wherever older material said "authority", read Corporation.

Group-based governance​

Under the hood, a Corporation's policy_address can be any account able to sign — a single key, a multisig, or a Cosmos SDK x/group group policy. The reference implementation provisions it as a group policy, which gives a Corporation multi-member, on-chain governance out of the box:

  • a group holds the Corporation's members, each with a voting weight;
  • a group policy defines the decision policy (a threshold or a percentage of the total weight) required to execute a proposal;
  • the resulting policy_address is the Corporation's on-chain identity.

Any action taken on behalf of the Corporation — updating its DID, creating an Ecosystem, granting an operator — is either signed directly by the policy_address (through a group proposal that members vote on) or by an authorized operator (see below). How the account is provisioned is an implementation concern; the data model only cares that a single policy_address signs for the Corporation.

Operators and delegation​

Voting on a group proposal for every routine transaction would be impractical. A Corporation therefore delegates day-to-day execution to operators: regular accounts authorized to submit specific message types on the Corporation's behalf.

  • The Corporation grants an operator an OperatorAuthorization that allow-lists the exact message type-URLs the operator may sign, optionally with a spend limit and an expiry.
  • A transaction executed by an operator is signed with the operator's key but acts on behalf of the Corporation — it is a delegable transaction that carries the Corporation as an argument.
  • A separate VSOperatorAuthorization (with per-Participant ParticipantAuthorizationRecord entries) delegates the narrower right to manage a Participant's sessions to a verifiable-service operator account.

This separation lets a Corporation keep governance in the hands of its members while allowing automated agents and operators to carry out the high-volume work.

Controls vs. owns​

A Corporation interacts with the VPR in two independent ways:

  • as the controller of zero or more Ecosystems — it owns the corresponding Ecosystem entries and manages each ecosystem's governance framework (EGF), credential schemas, and root ECOSYSTEM Participant entries;
  • as the owner of zero or more Participant entries in zero or more ecosystems — acting as ISSUER, VERIFIER, ISSUER_GRANTOR, VERIFIER_GRANTOR, or HOLDER for credential schemas of those ecosystems.

The two roles are decoupled: a Corporation may control no ecosystem and only hold Participant entries in third-party ecosystems; or control several ecosystems and additionally hold Participant entries in others; or any combination.

plantuml

Governance frameworks: CGF and EGF​

A GovernanceFrameworkVersion is owned by exactly one of an ecosystem or a corporation (XOR):

  • an Ecosystem Governance Framework (EGF) governs the roles, permissions, and compliance rules within an ecosystem;
  • a Corporation Governance Framework (CGF) governs the Corporation itself — how its members reach decisions and operate the entity.

Both are versioned and published as governance-framework documents (URL + digest_sri). Version 1 of the CGF is seeded when the Corporation is created.

Trust deposit is per-Corporation​

A Corporation's economic accountability is anchored by a single TrustDeposit, keyed by corporation_id. All trust-deposit growth, yield, and slashing accrue to the Corporation — not to individual accounts or Participant entries. See Trust Deposit and Reputation.

Ready to create one?

This page is conceptual. For the step-by-step transaction (building MsgCreateCorporation, funding the policy_address, granting an operator), see the how-to guide Create a Corporation.