The Cardano Foundation has spun out Veridian, a digital identity company it developed internally over three years, as an independent commercial business. Veridian makes credential software that lets people, organizations and AI agents prove who they are and what they are authorized to do, without relying on a central database.
Thomas A. Mayfield leads the company as chief executive. Frederik Gregaard, chief executive of the Cardano Foundation, chairs Veridian’s board, and Nicolas Jacquemart, the foundation’s chief legal officer, has also joined the board. The foundation is a Swiss not-for-profit organization that supports the Cardano blockchain.
Veridian’s technology is built on KERI and ACDC, open standards for managing cryptographic keys and issuing chained, tamper-evident credentials. The same standards underpin the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier, a digital credential for organizations. Chief Technology Officer Fergal O’Connor maintains the core KERI and ACDC software libraries. The Veridian Wallet is available on iOS and Android.
The company is targeting US state government demand. Veridian says it has mapped all 142 requirements in the implementation guide for Utah’s State-Endorsed Digital Identity program, which state lawmakers created this year through SB 275. The law establishes a digital identity bill of rights and sets requirements for digital wallet providers, verifiers and relying parties. The announcement does not name any state government customers.
Veridian is also being used for AI agent identity. Masumi, an AI agent payment and identity network on Cardano developed by Serviceplan Group and NMKR, uses Veridian to give agents verifiable identities. Counterparties can check an agent’s identity before a payment is made, and the credential can be revoked if the agent is compromised.
Veridian’s shares have been tokenized as ledger-based securities under Switzerland’s DLT Act, using CIP-0113, a programmable token standard developed by the foundation and the Cardano community. The foundation said Veridian is the first asset deployed on Cardano under that standard. The company plans to seek strategic partners and investors in 2027 to expand its US state government work, its enterprise business in Europe and its issuer network in Asia-Pacific, and to develop verifiable authority for AI agents.
“Veridian gives every person, organization and agent a credential that can be verified instantly and revoked just as fast, with no central database to compromise,” said Mayfield. “We spent three years building that inside the Cardano Foundation. As an independent company, we can now take it to the governments and enterprises that need it.”
Gregaard said the spin-out “gives Veridian the independence to move at the speed its market demands,” while the foundation continues to work with the company on bringing verifiable identity natively to Cardano.
Sources: Cardano Foundation, Utah Legislature
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
