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.
The Verana Foundation
The Verana Foundation is the non-profit steward of the open trust layer. It stewards the ecosystem's shared, off-network assets:
- Owns and hosts the open specifications — the Verifiable Trust Specification and the Verifiable Public Registry (VPR) Specification, authored in the open through public working groups.
- Hosts, stewards, and maintains the open-source software — the reference implementations, released under Apache 2.0, with copyright held by the contributors.
- Issues and administers the VNA utility token — which no party, including the Foundation, owns.
- Grows the ecosystem — through grants, integrations, developer relations, and partnerships.
What the Foundation deliberately cannot do is just as important: it cannot govern, secure, or operate the live Verana network, and it cannot run validator nodes.
The Verana Council
The Verana Council is the governance body of the live network, and the only body that secures it. Its members each run a validator node, and together they author the governance frameworks that keep the network neutral and accountable.
- Governs and secures the live network — only Council members may, and must, run a validator node.
- Authors the governance frameworks — the rules of the road for the network.
- Open and free to join — to enterprises, governments, academia, and standards bodies, with no dues and no capital contribution.
And like the Foundation, the Council has hard limits: it cannot own the specifications or the token, and it cannot be controlled by any single company.
Two bodies, fully separate by design
The two institutions are structurally independent. The Foundation holds the shared assets; the Council runs the network. Neither can capture the other, and neither can capture the trust layer on its own.
That is the point. A public trust layer only stays public if no single party can quietly take control of it. The separation of powers is not a bureaucratic detail — it is the guarantee.
Foundation membership and Council seats are open now. If you want to help build a more trustworthy internet, join us.