Cardano Foundation spins out Veridian and tokenizes the identity firm's shares on CIP-0113

The Cardano Foundation has spun out Veridian, its digital-identity project, as an independent Swiss company and tokenized Veridian's shares on the Cardano blockchain under CIP-0113, the programmable-token standard the foundation introduced this week.

"Veridian is the first to tokenize its own shares on the new CIP-0113 that we announced yesterday," Frederik Gregaard, the foundation's CEO and Veridian's chair, told CoinDesk in an email statement. Gregaard said the company has 1 million shares in total, most of which have been tokenized. "People have talked about tokenized equity for years, and now there's an operating company on Cardano doing it," he said.

CIP-0113, or Cardano Improvement Proposal 0113, lets an issuer attach rules to a token: who may receive it and, where required, whether it can be frozen, seized or transferred. The foundation designed those controls for regulated products such as stablecoins, funds and tokenized securities, whose issuers may need to enforce identity checks, sanctions controls or court orders whenever an asset changes hands.

That places the compliance logic inside the token itself. It is a different design from the register-linked tokenized-equity standard Bullish convened a group around in September, with shareholder-services firm Equiniti at the center, as CoinDesk reported at the time.

Veridian plans to build tools for governments, businesses and AI agents to prove their identity and specify their online activities. It is led by Thomas A. Mayfield, a blockchain engineer who previously led decentralized trust and identity solutions at the Cardano Foundation.

Veridian's wallet is live on iOS and Android, and the company says it has mapped Utah's digital-identity requirements. Utah's SB 275 took effect in May and created the state's State Endorsed Digital Identity Program. Credentials are issued using open standards known as KERI and ACDC, which are meant to let people, companies and software agents prove identity or authority without a central database holding the information.

Masumi, an AI-agent payment and identity network built on Cardano by Serviceplan Group and NMKR, already uses Veridian, the companies say. They describe it as a way for a counterparty to verify an agent's credentials before making a payment and to revoke them if the agent is compromised. Gregaard cited that need, along with the Utah framework, as the reason to separate Veridian from the nonprofit foundation: "AI agents will need verifiable identity too. Veridian can serve that market better as its own company."

Veridian plans to seek strategic investors in 2027, the foundation said.