What a QVI Actually Does All Day
10 August 2026 · 2 min read
Ask what a company that issues vLEIs does all day and most people guess cryptography. The signing math is the part that just works. A Qualified vLEI Issuer’s actual day is ceremonies, checks, and deadlines, defined in GLEIF’s published qualification documents down to the hour. Post 1 argued that becoming an issuer is a business decision. Here is the business.
The ceremony calendar
Issuance starts with people, not keys. Every person receiving a role credential is identity-verified at NIST 800-63A IAL2 or with an accepted national digital identity, then authenticates in a live session by countersigning a one-time challenge. A four-eyes rule keeps the person who verifies separate from the person who approves. Before any credential moves, the entity’s LEI must be active against GLEIF’s data, and the compliance target for mis-issuance is zero, not a tolerance band. Keys do not sit still either: signing keys rotate on a deliberately unpredictable schedule, between every six months and two years, and encryption keys rotate at least quarterly.
The clock is always running
Once credentials are in the world, the deadlines take over. An LEI lapses or changes status: the linked credentials must be revoked within 24 hours. A third party challenges vLEI data: fifteen calendar days to respond. A key compromise: GLEIF hears about it within 24 hours, and recovery runs at the issuer’s expense. Every issuance and every revocation is reported to GLEIF’s Reporting API. Monthly service reports are due by the tenth business day. Records are kept for ten years. And every year, on the anniversary of qualification, the issuer qualifies again.
Operations decide the economics
None of this is cryptographically hard. It is operationally demanding, and the demand grows with every credential issued. Whether an issuer thrives depends on how much of this calendar runs itself: ceremonies scheduled, checks enforced, rotations orchestrated, reports generated. Tooling decides the unit economics, and later in this series we will show what buying that tooling looks like.
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