Trust Over IP Foundation

The Trust Over IP (ToIP) Foundation is a Linux Foundation project launched in May 2020 to develop an architecture for Internet-scale digital trust that combines cryptographic assurance at the technical layer with human accountability at business, legal and social layers. The foundation emerged from earlier work on digital identity, verifiable credentials, and blockchain technology, culminating in a technical architecture paper published in IEEE Communications Standards Magazine in 2019.

The foundation's core technical work focuses on developing the ToIP Stack - a four-layer architecture for decentralized digital trust infrastructure. Key specifications developed by ToIP include the Trust Spanning Protocol for establishing trust relationships, the Trust Registry Query Protocol for querying authoritative ecosystem sources, and implementations of W3C DID methods like did:webs and did:x509. The foundation also maintains the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) specification for secure cryptographic key management and the Authentic Chained Data Containers (ACDC) specification for verifiable data.

Notable aspects of ToIP's governance include:

• Hosted by the Linux Foundation under its Joint Development Foundation structure
• Over 500 organizational and individual members as of 2024
• Work organized through Working Groups and Task Forces
• Collaboration with other standards bodies like W3C and DIF
• Government participation including the Government of British Columbia and Government of Western Australia
• Industry adoption from companies like GLEIF, Accenture, and GS1

The foundation emphasizes practical interoperability and has published specifications, governance frameworks, and implementation guides to enable adoption of decentralized digital trust infrastructure at scale. In September 2024, ToIP moved under the newly formed Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust umbrella as its first standards project.