Goverance Trust Triangle

While some credentials only have a single issuer, others can be issued by many issuers. For example, passports are issued by hundreds of countries, and credit cards are issued by tens of thousands of banks and credit unions. For any credential that will be widely used by many holders and honored by many verifiers, there is a second trust triangle — the ​ governance trust triangle​ — as shown below.

A governance authority can represent any set of issuers who want to standardize the business, legal, and technical policies for issuing, holding, and verifying a set of credentials. A governance authority can take any form — government, consortia, cooperative — but the purpose is the same: publish a governance framework​ that documents the rules by which the members of a trust community agreed to abide.