GLEIF reveals issuance and infrastructure models for vLEI
The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has unveiled the issuance and technical infrastructure models that it will deploy in its new verifiable LEI (vLEI) system. The vLEI, announced in December, will be a kind of digital fingerprint, enabling instant and automated verification between entities across all industry sectors worldwide.
The issuance process follows the standards of both the World Wide Web Consortium’s Verifiable Credentials Data Model and the Trust over IP Foundation. It makes GLEIF the system’s ‘root of trust’, safeguarding a chain of verification extending to GLEIF-certified vLEI issuers, identified entities, and then on to additional credentials pinpointing individuals or systems working within those organisations in specific roles.
The vLEI infrastructure is designed to be open and independent, allowing the system to interoperate securely with all technology models by adopting a ‘network of networks’ approach. It will deploy the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) protocol, enabling the vLEI’s cryptographic keys to be generated and controlled directly all along the chain, by GLEIF, vLEI issuers and vLEI holders.
“For the vLEI to become the de-facto choice in digitized organizational identity globally, both its issuing system and underlying architecture have to embody GLEIF’s unwavering commitment to open systems and open data,” said GLEIF CEO Stephan Wolf, CEO, GLEIF. “The approaches we are laying out today will enable the vLEI system to support any other blockchain or SSI network or system, while retaining the capacity to utilize them all, and be able to support cloud infrastructures as well.”
Going digital is the next step for LEI in reliably identifying entities over time and space, and will make an important contribution to the transparency and utility of reporting data. We look forward to continuing to work with GLEIF in this important area and to seeing vLEIs integrated into XBRL reporting systems in the not too distant future.
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