Glossary

Accreditation. The audience word for a participant entry: an ecosystem's recognition that a corporation may act in a role (issuer, verifier, grantor, holder) for one credential schema, between two dates.

Active participant. A participant entry whose effective window contains now and that is neither revoked nor slashed. Only active entries count in trust resolution.

Applicant. The corporation (through its operator or its agent) that starts an onboarding process to obtain a participant entry.

Corporation. The actor of the registry: a legal or organizational entity, realized on chain as a group of accounts with a decision policy. Its policy address signs for it, directly through proposals or through authorized operators. It controls zero or more ecosystems and owns zero or more participant entries.

Corporation governance framework (CGF). The versioned documents that govern a corporation itself.

Credential schema. A registry entry owned by an ecosystem: a JSON schema plus the policy that governs it (onboarding modes per role, validity periods, pricing asset, digest algorithm). Immutable except for the validity periods.

Delegable message. A transaction executed on behalf of a corporation by an authorized operator. Nearly every message is delegable.

Digest. A content hash anchored on chain with its block time. Used to give a W3C credential an objective issuance time, and to prove a document existed unchanged.

DIDComm. The messaging protocol over which Verifiable Services and wallets connect, exchange credentials and run flows. The mandatory bootstrap channel of a Verifiable Service.

Ecosystem. A registry entry controlled by a corporation: a DID, a governance framework, credential schemas, and the tree of participants accredited for them. The Verana word for what other communities call a trust registry.

Ecosystem governance framework (EGF). The versioned documents that state the rules of an ecosystem: who may join, how, at what price, what is slashed.

ECS ecosystem. The ecosystem that publishes the five Essential Credential Schemas on a network and accredits their issuers. The trust root of every Proof-of-Trust.

Essential Credential Schemas (ECS). Service, Organization, Persona, User Agent, Badge: the five schemas that make a minimum trust resolution possible.

Exchange rate. A governance-owned on-chain rate between two assets, used to convert fees priced in trust units or fiat into the native coin at transaction time.

Fee grant. Authorization for an operator or an agent to pay transaction fees from the corporation's account, bounded by message types, amounts and periods.

Grantor (issuer grantor, verifier grantor). An ecosystem operator accredited to onboard issuers or verifiers for a schema, so the ecosystem does not validate every applicant itself.

Holder. The entity that holds a credential. For some schemas holders have a participant entry (so the issuer can track and revoke); for permissionless schemas they do not.

Indexer. The service that replays the chain, resolves DIDs, evaluates trust and serves queries, subscriptions and the TRQP endpoint. In v4 it includes trust resolution.

Linked verifiable presentation. A presentation published at a URL and declared in a DID Document, so anyone resolving the DID finds the credentials the controller chose to make public.

MCP server (Verana). The server that exposes the registry, the graph and a VS Agent to AI agents as Model Context Protocol tools.

Onboarding modes. How a role is obtained for a schema: OPEN (self-create), ECOSYSTEM_ONBOARDING_PROCESS (the ecosystem validates), GRANTOR_ONBOARDING_PROCESS (a grantor validates); for holders, ISSUER_ONBOARDING_PROCESS or PERMISSIONLESS.

Onboarding process. The applicant and validator interaction that turns a pending participant entry into a validated one: on-chain start, off-chain evidence over vt-flow, on-chain validation.

Operator. An account a corporation has authorized to sign specific message types on its behalf.

Participant entry. The registry record of an accreditation: corporation, DID, schema, role, validator, effective window, fees, onboarding state, deposit. The audience says accreditation; the protocol says participant.

Participant session. The on-chain record of a credential issuance or verification that triggers pay-per-issuance or pay-per-verification fees.

Participant tree. The validator chain of a schema: ecosystem root, grantors, issuers and verifiers, holders.

Pricing asset. The unit a schema prices its fees in: the native coin or another on-chain coin (COIN), trust units (TU), or a fiat currency settled off chain (FIAT). Trust deposits are always in the native coin.

Proof-of-Trust. What a wallet or service shows about a DID after trust resolution: trust status, the service, who operates it, the other credentials it presents, and the chain behind each.

Trust deposit. The per-corporation stake that grows with every fee paid or received, cannot be withdrawn in v4, and can be slashed by an ecosystem or by network governance.

Trust graph. The query layer over the indexed network: faceted search and traversal queries over DIDs, ecosystems, corporations, schemas and endpoints.

Trust resolution. The recursive verification of a DID: its linked presentations, each credential, each VTJSC, the issuer's accreditation at the right time, then the issuer itself, down to the ecosystem DID.

Trust unit (TU). A value-stable unit of account for fees, converted to the native coin at transaction time. Not a token.

TRQP. The ToIP Trust Registry Query Protocol, served by the indexer: authorization and recognition queries about DIDs and schemas.

Validator. The participant (ecosystem, grantor or issuer) that runs an onboarding process with an applicant and validates its entry.

Verifiable Service (VS). A service identified by a resolvable DID whose DID Document presents its Essential Credentials as linked presentations and declares a DIDComm endpoint, and which verifies its peers before serving them.

Verifiable Trust Credential (VTC). A credential, in any of the three formats, that references a VTJSC and therefore an ecosystem and a schema on the registry.

Verifiable Trust JSON Schema Credential (VTJSC). The credential an ecosystem DID issues about one of its credential schemas, binding the on-chain schema to the ecosystem. Every VTC points at one.

Verifiable User Agent (VUA). A wallet, browser or agent acting for a person that resolves trust before connecting and presents a Proof-of-Trust.

VS Agent. Verana's agent runtime: it holds a service's DID and credentials, speaks DIDComm and OpenID4VC, runs vt-flow, resolves trust, and operates on the registry for its corporation.

VS operator authorization. The authorization a corporation gives its agent's account for one participant entry and a fixed set of message types, optionally with a fee grant.

Verifiable Public Registry (VPR). The public ledger that holds ecosystems, schemas, participants, deposits and the business model. The Verana network is one.