FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — 31 August 2026
iSHARE Foundation Joins Ayra to Define How Trust Moves Between Data Spaces
The two organisations will partner to make proof of identity and data rights verifiable across data space boundaries, as Ayra co-leads the Global Digital Collaboration Trust Registry Task Force in Geneva, September 1–3
GENEVA — 31 August 2026 — The iSHARE Foundation has joined the Ayra Association as an Ecosystem Member and will partner with Ayra to define how trust moves between data spaces. It joins more than 30 organizations building the coordination layer that lets one ecosystem’s trust decisions be understood and honoured across ecosystem boundaries.
iSHARE operates the trust framework that more than 18 European sector data spaces already run on. It is contractual, it is in production, and it answers the real questions every day: who is this participant, what are they authorised to do, and who may act on their behalf. Those answers travel as iSHARE Credentials: W3C Verifiable Credentials that any partner can check, with no central authority needed at the moment of transaction. The key item is the Data Rights Credential — a standard credential stating what data a participant may access and how it may use it, with machine-readable iSHARE Licence terms attached. That puts legal assurance in every transaction, not just every relationship..
That is what makes this different. Most conversations about trust registries are still about what organisations intend to build. iSHARE brings commercial ecosystems that are issuing and verifying iSHARE Credentials in live commercial traffic today.
The iSHARE Trust Framework rests on contract, which makes it powerful inside a data space and quiet at the edge of it. For example, Dutch logistics firms with iSHARE components will now be able to prove its legally trusted status to a partner in Japan or Canada as easily as it does at home. Trust stays intact, and now it travels everywhere the business goes.
Nobody has settled what crossing that border should look like. That is the work the two organizations are taking on together. iSHARE is not adopting a finished answer — it is helping write one, from the position of an operator whose participants hit the problem in live commercial deals.
“iSHARE provides the legal and technical building blocks that give data rights cryptographic proof: iSHARE Credentials state who a participant is and what data it may access and use — securely, transparently, across digital ecosystems. Our participants have already solved trust inside their own data spaces; the next strategic question is what happens when a partner sits outside that perimeter. Rather than waiting for an answer to arrive, we are partnering with Ayra on neutral ground to make the Data Rights Credential a global standard for data access and data usage — proof that travels, with legal assurance attached to every transaction — a future-proof foundation that extends trusted data sharing globally.” — Gerard van der Hoeven, Executive Director, iSHARE Foundation
The division of labour is deliberate. iSHARE accredits its own issuers and governs its own credentials, for its own participants. Ayra replaces no authority and competes with no operator — its job is the connective layer between them, so a business checking a credential can trace it back to an authority it already trusts.
The timing is not accidental. The Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) event opens in Geneva tomorrow and runs through September 3. Ayra co-leads Track 1 of its Trust Registry Task Force, sponsored by France and Apple, alongside national and large-technology leads across roughly 40 organizations. Ayra holds the pen on the track’s foundational work: the shared vocabulary and scope the whole task force operates within, and how authorities and the issuers behind them become checkable across jurisdictions. Ayra leads the Trust Registry Task Force presentation and panel on Day 2 (9am, Beta room.)
Work of this kind has a window. Once a standard settles, everyone gets to use it — but only the organizations in the roomonly the organisations in the room while it is still forming get to define what it means. Members like iSHARE, with production registries andcredentials in production and paying participants, put working evidence into those drafts instead of theory.
“A year ago the question outside our membership was ‘what is a trust registry?’ That question is gone. Nation states and the largest technology companies have worked out that registries are a business strategy, not plumbing. What we have been short of is ecosystems in production. iSHARE arrives with participants, credentials, contracts, and registries already running — and with the one gap our work exists to close.” — Darrell O’Donnell, Executive Director, Ayra Association
What it opens up
The commercial effect starts well before the engineering finishes.
For iSHARE participants: a supplier market rather than a shortlist. Ayra’s membership spans the organisations that build the issuing, verifying, and registry technology this work runs on, and they build to a common bar instead of to each other’s proprietary integrations. A participant picking a vendor keeps the ability to pick a different one later. The second gain is reach: the iSHARE Credentials participants already hold become proof that partners far beyond the framework can recognise, which opens markets where exporting the legal framework first was never realistic. Recognition travels faster than contract.
For Ayra members: Europe’s data spaces become an addressable market with a partner inside them. Members selling credential issuance, wallets, registry services, and verification get a route to buyers running this in production today rather than evaluating it for next year.
For both: the pairing answers the objection that quietly decides hard deals. Governments, regulated industries, and anyone being asked to build on infrastructure a competitor controls want proof they are not locked in. Two frameworks meeting on neutral ground is that proof.
Joint webinar, September 22
Ayra and iSHARE will run a joint webinar on September 22 at 4pm CEDT (7am PDT), walking through what the partnership means in practice for participants and members on both sides, and how to get involved. Register here.
Technical and governance groundwork between the two organizations is already underway.
About Ayra
Ayra Association is a Swiss nonprofit building the coordination layer for digital trust. Its work is the Ayra Trust Network: a global, decentralized network of authoritative ecosystems, where each ecosystem keeps its own authority and governance, and trust decisions made in one can be understood and honoured in another. There is no centre to it by design — no single operator, and no ecosystem that others must route through.
Ayra stewards the Ayra Profile of the Trust Registry Query Protocol (the protocol itself is a global standard, developed at Trust over IP) and the Ayra Conformance Test Suite, and convenes the cross-ecosystem governance that decides what “conformant,” “recognized,” and “authoritative” mean across ecosystem boundaries. Ayra coordinates; its members build and operate. More at ayra.forum.
About the iSHARE Foundation
The iSHARE Foundation is a non-profit organisation that standardises data rights credentials. Through the iSHARE Trust Framework, it gives data rights cryptographic proof: iSHARE Credentials — W3C Verifiable Credentials — prove who a participant is and what data it may access and use, with machine-readable licence terms attached and no central authority needed at the moment of transaction. That puts legal assurance in every transaction. Because any partner can verify them, iSHARE Credentials make trust — and the data sharing it unlocks — interoperable across data spaces. The Foundation never issues credentials itself; it accredits issuers, publishes the credential schemas and operates the eIDAS-anchored Trusted List relied on by European sector data spaces from logistics and mobility to energy, construction and agriculture.
Media contact
- Ayra Assocation: media@ayra.forum
- iSHARE Foundation: ecosystem@ishare.eu