You earn trust. You should keep it. That’s true for a nurse carrying a license between hospitals — and it’s just as true for an athlete, an actor, a fictional character, or a creator whose name, image, and likeness are now among their most valuable assets.
Today we’re glad to welcome The HAND Foundation to Ayra as an Ecosystem member.
What HAND does
The HAND Foundation works to give athletes, actors, creators, and public figures something they don’t have today: a persistent, consent-based digital identifieridentity that belongs to them, governed by no single company. As the values custodian for an open standard — the Universal Talent Identifier — HAND establishes who a person really is in the cultural industries, and keeps that identifieridentity in the person’s hands.
It’s a mission that fits naturally with ours. Ayra makes earned trust portable across networks. HAND helps establish identity and consent in the creative economy. Different layers, shared purpose.
The future we’re setting out to build
A welcome is the start, not the destination. Together, we want to connect HAND’s network to the Ayra Trust Network — so that the trust HAND establishes could one day be recognized and honored well beyond HAND’s own walls. That work is just beginning.
Here’s the shift we’re aiming for. Looking up “does this identity exist?” is the easy part, and it stays open. The valuable questions are authorization questions:
- Is this brand licensed to use this person’s likeness commercially?
- Did this person consent to this synthetic, AI-generated version of themselves?
- Is this agent — human or AI — authorized to act on the creator’s behalf?
Those are exactly the questions a trust network is built to answer. The future we’re working toward is one where any Ayra-connected verifier — a platform, a publisher, an AI provenance checker — could ask them directly, in a standard way, with no bespoke integration.
The path: open standards, not lock-in
We intend to build that bridge on open standards. The Trust Registry Query Protocol (TRQP) — a Trust Over IP–approved standard — is a lightweight, read-only way to ask a trust registry “is this entity authorized to do this thing?” and “does this network recognize that one?” The Ayra TRQP Profile defines how registries in the Ayra Trust Network would answer those questions consistently.
The aim is simple: integrate once, exchange with every conformant participant. HAND wouldn’t build a one-off connector for each partner, and partners wouldn’t build one for HAND. They’d speak the same protocol.
Why it matters now
We’ve built a world that can generate a flawless synthetic likeness in seconds. A perfectly signed lie at machine speed — a face, a voice, a performance with a valid signature but no consent behind it. Cryptography alone can’t tell you whether the person agreed. That’s a human-trust question, and it needs an answer that travels.
That’s the gap HAND and Ayra are setting out to close together: consent and authorship you can actually verify, recognized across networks, controlled by the person who earned it. The work starts now.
Welcome, Will Kreth and the whole HAND Foundation team. We’re excited for what’s ahead.