Becoming a vLEI Issuer Is a Business Decision, Not a Protocol Project
4 August 2026 · 2 min read
More than 3 million legal entities worldwide carry an LEI, the 20-character identifier regulators and counterparties use to answer a basic question: who is this company? The LEI answers it in a database. The vLEI answers it in the transaction itself: it wraps the LEI in a verifiable credential, so an organization proves “we are this legal entity” with cryptography, not paperwork and manual lookups.
That identity is also delegable. A Legal Entity vLEI is issued to the organization itself. OOR credentials cover people in official roles; ECR credentials cover people in context-specific roles. A signature on a filing or a contract traces back through the role holder to the entity, and every link in the chain must verify, or the credential does not.
The gate is qualification; the barrier is operations
vLEIs are issued by Qualified vLEI Issuers, and GLEIF’s Qualification Program is the gate. The process is public and well defined: sign an NDA, submit the full qualification documentation within sixty days, pass GLEIF’s review, then complete a technical readiness assessment and a recorded dry-run covering multi-sig identifier creation, credential issuance, key rotation, and revocation.
Qualification, though, is only the beginning. An issuer then runs witness infrastructure, key ceremonies, revocation and renewal, service-level commitments, and an annual re-qualification on every anniversary. The work is operational, and it does not stop.
Build or buy
GLEIF’s own business requirements treat issuance as a business: QVIs may charge fees for issuance, verification, revocation, and ancillary services, and each QVI is solely responsible for its own profit and loss. So the real question for a would-be issuer is not whether the protocol works; KERI and ACDC are running in production. It is whether you build and audit the infrastructure yourself, or buy it and spend your effort on clients. That is a business decision, and it deserves a business case.
If you are weighing it, we will walk you through the issuance lifecycle end to end. Talk to an expert.