Verifiable Trust Networks (VTNs)

What They Are

A Verifiable Trust Network is a higher-level grouping above Verifiable Trust Communities (VTCs). If a VTC is like a club or professional association, a VTN is like a federation of clubs — an umbrella organization that coordinates multiple communities under shared governance.

VTNs have their own C-DIDs (Community DIDs), just like VTCs. The hierarchy works like this:

VTN (Verifiable Trust Network)
├── VTC (Verifiable Trust Community)
│   ├── Member (person/device/agent)
│   ├── Member
│   └── ...
├── VTC
│   ├── Member
│   └── ...
└── ...

How Membership Works

A VTN’s relationship with each member VTC is expressed as a bi-directional pair of Membership Credentials (VMCs) — one issued by the VTN to the VTC, one issued by the VTC back to the VTN. This is the same credential type used for individual membership in a VTC, but the subject is a C-DID (the community’s DID) rather than an M-DID (a person’s DID).

This means the Decentralized Trust Graph supports hierarchical community structures: a VTN contains VTCs, and VTCs contain individual members.

Invitations

For Invitation Credentials (VICs), VTNs can authorize onboarding at multiple levels:

• A VTN’s C-DID can invite a VTC to join the network
• A member VTC’s C-DID can invite another VTC on behalf of the network

Why VTNs Matter

VTNs enable trust to scale beyond individual communities. If two people belong to different VTCs within the same VTN, trust paths can traverse the network structure — the VTN’s governance provides a shared trust anchor. This is particularly relevant for large ecosystems like the First Person Network, where many independent communities need to interoperate.

Vocabulary (WD01)

Working Draft 01 of the spec gives the VTN its own glossary entries: a VTN trust anchor is a VTC that anchors a VTN; VTN members are VTCs; the VTN invitation credential is the VIC’s second functional variant, issued to a prospective member VTC’s C-DID; and trust registries are where VTN anchors are discovered. The First Person Network is the canonical example of a VTN.

See also: verifiable-trust-community, membership-credential, decentralized-trust-graph, invitation-credential