About the Foundation

The NFID Foundation is a vendor-neutral standards body. It publishes the trust framework, the attestation envelope formats, the registry specification, and the governance model for government-issued and ecosystem-aligned identity in access infrastructure.

It is equally clear what the Foundation is not.

Not an identity provider.
It issues no credentials. The credentials its framework consumes are issued by governments and ecosystem authorities.
Not a wallet or device platform.
It specifies what wallets and devices exchange at the access boundary. It does not build them or set any platform’s terms.
Not a manufacturer or operator.
It specifies what verifiers and panels exchange. It does not make readers, panels, or locks, and it operates no access platform.
Not a blockchain or token project.
The registry it specifies is storage-agnostic. It defines the verifiability and governance properties any conforming backend must satisfy, and does not specify, prefer, or require a backend technology.
Not a replacement for any layer-specific standards body.
Its scope is the cross-layer framework. It produces no competing credential data model, presentation protocol, transport, or wallet primitive.

Governance

The NFID Foundation is a Michigan nonprofit organization, governed by a board of directors under its bylaws. Its intellectual property rights policy governs contributions to the Foundation’s specifications and their licensing. Governance documents are available on request at contact@nfid.foundation.

Specification lifecycle. A contribution begins as a proposal, advances to a working draft, undergoes public review, is ratified by the working group, and is published. Decisions are recorded. Review periods are announced on Updates and on the specification’s own page.

What “ratified” means here. The working group has reviewed a contribution, addressed the comments raised in public review, and minuted its adoption as a Foundation specification. It is the act by which the Foundation stands behind a specification. It is not equivalent to national-body ratification in a large standards organization, and the Foundation does not present it as such.

Vendor neutrality

A standards body that consumes government-issued identity must be credibly neutral among the vendors who implement its specifications. The Foundation’s neutrality rests on four conditions, stated so they can be held to:

  1. The specifications remain open and implementable.

    Written so that an organization other than any incumbent implementer can build a conforming implementation from the text.

  2. Alternative implementations are viable.

    The specifications encode no dependencies that make a competing implementation impractical, and the open-source verifier library lowers the cost of entry rather than raising it.

  3. Governance is documented and open to challenge.

    The lifecycle is public, the working group’s decisions are recorded, and a periodic governance review reports against these conditions.

  4. Ratification requires assent beyond any one organization or aligned group.

    No single implementer or bloc can adopt a specification on its own.

The working group began with the organizations already building in this field, some of which implement what the Foundation publishes. That is a fair thing to question, and the Foundation’s answer is structural rather than rhetorical: the four conditions above, made concrete and reviewed in public.

The working group

The technical work of the Foundation is done in its working group, composed today of technical leaders from the access-control ecosystem. That reflects where the work began, not where it is meant to stay. An active priority is broadening participation across credential issuers, wallet platforms, regulated-industry deployers, and academic and research participants.

Members

Lead author of Beyond Credentials: Kabir Maiga, KeyShare (PassiveBolt); Founding Member, NFID Foundation.

Working group members, in alphabetical order:

  • Shane Baker, LEGIC Identsystems
  • Salvatore D’Agostino, IDmachines
  • Jonathan Horvath, Z-bit Systems; Chair, Technical Working Group
  • Zachary Klares, PDQ
  • Ezra Ozer
  • Travis Willis, LEGIC Identsystems

Affiliations are listed for identification only. No affiliation implies that organization’s endorsement of any position the Foundation publishes.

History

2023. The Foundation publishes its first paper, leading with a purpose-built distributed-ledger implementation and an associated token model as the defining feature of its architecture, and stating commitments to interoperability, privacy, and resource-constrained devices.

2024. The Foundation launches publicly in March and forms its technical working group later in the year. The launch described the architecture in the terms of the 2023 paper.

2026. The working group publishes Beyond Credentials on 31 October. The technology preference of 2023 has resolved into a verifiability contract; the architectural commitments carry forward unchanged. The 2023 paper remains available on request as a historical record.