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Referencing Trust Registry within a Verifiable Credential

Trust Registries are referenced within Policies in the Verifiable Credential body. This enables Relying Parties to traverse the trust chain and verify that the issuer, accrediting entity (TAO) and Root of Trust (rTAO) are all legitimate entities.

Within the body of the Verifiable Credential, trusted issuers will need to configure the termsOfUse section to reference DIDs or DID URLs of trust registry entries, for example:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/v2",
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/examples/v2"
  ],
  "id": "http://university.example/credentials/3732",
  "type": ["VerifiableCredential", "ExampleDegreeCredential"],
  "issuer": "did:cheqd:testnet:c2f18b6b-32e2-48d1-a5a8-5f5d2d9798f0",
  "validFrom": "2010-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "credentialSubject": {
    "id": "did:cheqd:testnet:b4902745-5b5b-423e-820a-0773b033f2b9",
    "degree": {
      "type": "ExampleBachelorDegree",
      "name": "Bachelor of Science and Arts"
  "termsOfUse": {
    "type": "AccreditationPolicy",
    "parentAccreditation": "did:cheqd:testnet:c2f18b6b-32e2-48d1-a5a8-5f5d2d9798f0/resources/58c01595-f884-4a3b-add4-8c691e16b8ee",
    "rootAuthorisation": "did:cheqd:testnet:c2f18b6b-32e2-48d1-a5a8-5f5d2d9798f0/resources/58c01595-f884-4a3b-add4-8c691e16b8ee"
  }
}

For Verifiable Credentials that are issued (not accreditations), the following sections of the termsOfUse section MUST be present:

Parameter
Input
Required

type

Yes

parentAccreditation

A valid DID URL

Yes

rootAuthorisation

A valid DID URL

Yes

Through parsing through this credential, a relying party can check the accreditation of the issuer, the "parent" accreditation. This accreditation will include its own Policy pointing up the trust chain all the way to a Root of Trust.

Using a protocol like TRAIN, a relying party can take the verifiable credential as an input and check whether the issuer is accredited to issue the type of credential, all the way back to a Root of Trust, and according to a particular governance framework.

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