Cardano Foundation spun out Veridian, its digital-identity project, as an independent Swiss company on October 8 and tokenized the firm’s shares as ledger-based securities under Switzerland’s DLT Act, according to the foundation’s announcement. The share issuance is the first asset deployed on Cardano’s new CIP-0113 programmable-token standard.
Veridian, led by chief executive Thomas A. Mayfield, builds trust infrastructure that lets governments, organizations and individuals prove who is on the other side of a digital interaction, and what they are authorized to do, without a central database. The company said it will seek strategic partners and investors in 2027 to expand its U.S. state-government work, its enterprise business in Europe, and a growing issuer network in Asia-Pacific.
What Veridian Builds
Veridian is built on KERI and ACDC, open identity standards already recognized by regulators, and its chief technology officer Fergal O’Connor maintains the core KERI and ACDC libraries. The Veridian Wallet is live on iOS and Android, and the company has mapped all 142 requirements of Utah’s State-Endorsed Digital Identity implementation guide. Utah’s SB 275, which took effect in May, made the state the first in the U.S. to legislate a state-endorsed, privacy-preserving digital identity program.
“The internet shipped without a way to prove who is on the other side,” Mayfield said. “That was a problem when it was only people. It is a far bigger one now that AI agents are moving money and data on our behalf.”
First Tokenized Equity on CIP-0113
The share tokenization uses CIP-0113, the programmable-token standard the Cardano Foundation and community introduced on October 7. The standard lets an issuer attach rules to a token, including who may receive it and whether it can be frozen, seized or transferred, controls designed for regulated products such as stablecoins, funds and tokenized securities. Veridian’s shares give the standard its first live equity use case, alongside other tokenized-equities efforts such as Securitize’s onchain U.S. equities.
“This is a milestone for the Cardano ecosystem,” said Frederik Gregaard, chief executive of the Cardano Foundation and chair of Veridian. “Veridian is built on open standards, it has a product in the market, and it is solving a problem that governments are now writing into law.”
Why Identity Is Moving Onchain
Identity fraud cost U.S. consumers $27.3 billion in 2025, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, and AI agents now act on behalf of people and companies with no reliable way to verify or revoke their authority. Veridian’s technology is already used by Masumi, an AI-agent payment and identity network on Cardano built by Serviceplan Group and NMKR, which lets a counterparty verify an agent’s credentials before a payment and revoke them if the agent is compromised.
Gregaard and Nicolas Jacquemart, the foundation’s chief legal officer, have joined Veridian’s board. With more than ten U.S. states now observing Utah’s digital-identity model, the spin-out positions Veridian to serve state-government demand alongside its enterprise and issuer business.
