Ayra: What it is—and is not

Jan 20, 2025

Ayra: What it is—and is not

After six months of planning, on Thursday January 16, we announced that the initiative begun under the name Global Acceptance Network (GAN) was now formally Ayra. Introduction to Ayra, the first of four new white papers announced that day, explains:

Ayra (eye-rah) is a new digital public utility for building trusted relationships online. It was conceived in March 2024 by a group of individuals and organizations who recognized that trust on the Internet has been steadily eroding—and that generative AI was now pouring gas on the fire. While there are many vendor-led and sector-specific solutions, piecemeal approaches are not enough to achieve the scale required for these efforts to rebuild and sustain trust online.

We need a new layer of infrastructure.

In this blog post we will quickly summarize—in just five bullets—what this new layer of infrastructure is and is not.

What Ayra is—in five bullets

  • Ayra is a global public utility similar to DNS—but designed for digital trust verification, not domain naming. This distributed network of Ayra-recognized trust registries is called the Ayra Trust Network. It will enable trusted information of any type to be verified by anyone in the world in seconds.
  • Ayra Association is the multi-stakeholder governance body for the Ayra Trust Network. As a Swiss Association, the Ayra Association is designed from the ground up to represent all stakeholders in this new layer—individuals, businesses, governments, civil society organizations, and infrastructure providers.
  • Ayra is a forum for the collaborative development of digital trust clusters. A cluster is a group of digital trust ecosystems—issuers, holders, and verifiers of digital credentials—who need to solve business, governance and technical and problems at scale. Ayra provide a neutral forum to convene and facilitate the work needed to create these trust clusters. See the Introduction to Ayra paper for a list of the leading candidates.
  • Ayra is a business, governance, and technical community for solving the hardest interoperability problems in digital trust infrastructure. The same way the IETF fostered an interoperable Internet, and the W3C fostered an interoperable Web, Ayra will foster a trustworthy Internet.
  • Ayra strengthens government-issued credentials. The Ayra Trust Network amplifies the authority of government-issued credentials by enabling instant, worldwide cryptographic verification. This protects citizens from fraud while extending the reach and reliability of official government documentation, making government credentials even more essential in our digital world. The system helps governments better serve and protect their citizens by preventing credential theft and forgery.

What Ayra is not—in five bullets

  • The Ayra Association does not issue digital credentials. Rather, the Ayra Trust Network is a global network of issuers, each operating within its own digital trust ecosystem with its own governance. The Ayra Trust Network is only involved in the facilitation of the trusted information exchange.
  • Ayra is not a technical standards organization. Instead, the Ayra Association partners closely with standards bodies such as Trust Over IP (ToIP), Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to use the standards developed by those organizations. Similarly, we partner with open-source organizations where software is required, working with organizations like Open Wallet Foundation (OWF), Linux Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and others. 
  • Ayra is not specific to any industry or country. The Ayra Trust Network is a global public utility, similar to DNS, that can be used by any company, industry, government, community, or individual.
  • Ayra is not controlled by any company or government. The Ayra Association is a neutral, international Swiss nonprofit organization carefully designed from the ground up to represent the interests of all stakeholders in this trust layer. Ayra Projects and Ayra Working Groups are designed specifically to enable businesses, civil society organizations, and governments to collaborate to solve the hardest problems in building safe, privacy-preserving, interoperable digital trust infrastructure.
  • Ayra is not a “talk shop”. While the Ayra Association welcomes the expertise of policymakers, researchers, and academic experts, its mission is to build and operationalize a new layer of digital public infrastructure that will solve some of the most pressing problems in cybersecurity and cyberprivacy that plague the Internet today.