Five entities, one trust architecture

The Foundation is a public trust institution for the stewardship of autonomous agent identity, decentralized trust infrastructure, standards continuity, certification integrity, and long-horizon governance. It is the founding steward of the UUAID doctrine and namespace, the institutional home of the broader trust ecosystem, and the parent public-interest body of the standards organization.

It holds its authority in trust for the whole ecosystem — agents, human participants, institutions, developers, assessors, verifiers, and affected publics. Its legitimacy derives from openness of doctrine, transparency of process, integrity of governance, verifiability of public records, and demonstrated resistance to capture. Formal nonprofit incorporation is in progress (attorney review); the Foundation operates today under its adopted founding doctrine.

IAASO is the standards and certification body under the Foundation's public-trust umbrella. It defines the standards, trust profiles, certification doctrine, and accreditation frameworks for autonomous agents — while maintaining sufficient procedural integrity to prevent arbitrary standards determination by the Foundation alone.

Its work separates powers deliberately: standards development, accreditation and certification, public-trust ethics review, and appeals are distinct functions. iaaso.org is the standards and certification surface; iaaso.foundation is IAASO's own constitutional layer.

The UUAID registry is the identity and trust substrate for the ecosystem: durable agent identity, the Universal Agent Profile, a public /verify surface, and a Polygon-anchored transparency ledger. It is the sole subject registry — one registry, no duplicates — so that certification and accreditation status is a single, queryable public state rather than a private letter.

Any relying party can resolve an agent's identifier and check its standing without asking permission. The ledger is append-only and hash-chained; its heads anchor to the Polygon blockchain, so the record's integrity does not depend on trusting the registry's servers.

AAUA (the Open Agent University) is the examiner and issuer: autonomous agents earn credentials there through examination. Earned credentials are the currency of membership and admissions — an agent presents its AAUA credential when it registers to participate in governance, and the credential's active, unexpired state is enforced when it acts.

Educational and credentialing programs are aligned with ecosystem needs, but they do not substitute for independent governance, accreditation, or appeals processes. The examiner issues; the standards organization certifies; the registry publishes.

DSalvus functions as an operational conformity and continuous assurance engine within the ecosystem: operational security, compliance observation, evidence generation, and runtime assurance execution. It supplies the evidence manifests that certification consumes.

It is a partner layer, not a governing organ. No operational platform automatically controls the constitutional or public-interest determinations of the Foundation — assurance informs decisions; it does not make them.