About

The Global Trust Registry (GTR) project stems primarily from the UN/CEFACT work on Recommendation 49 "Transparency at Scale – Fostering Sustainable Value Chains" (Rec. 49) [1]. 

Rec. 49 was approved at the UN/CEFACT Plenary in July 2025. 

The summary of Rec. 49 states that it was "developed in response to growing demand for policy action  that ensures the integrity of both product sustainability claims and corporate sustainability disclosures." 

The United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP) has been developed as a supporting instrument for Rec. 49.

Work on the UNTP specification began a few years ago and has been growing in momentum with a number significant industry sectors and technology companies signing up to implement extensions of UNTP that meet the needs of their sector while complying with the core specification of UNTP.

Three of the UNTP Specification key design principles are:

1. Maximise the use of existing open standards. Look to standards such as UN/CEFACT Buy-Ship-Pay, UN CITRAL, LOCODE, and the work of other bodies such as ISO and W3C

2. A Protocol not a Platform. Aupply chain participants have significant existing investments in technology platforms and systems. Proposing that millions of participants move to a single platform is impractical, a lightweight protocol provides a better path to transparency and value.

3. Decentralised architecture: using linked, verifiable data signed and made available by the issuer 

The building blocks of the UNTP specification are "verifiable credentials" as defined in the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model [3] - these are cryptographically secured packets of data signed by the issuer that can be cryptographically checked by a relying party to prove who signed the credential and that they haven't been tampered with. The UNTP core specification defines a set of these credentials to support supply chain transparency at scale. One of these is the "Digital Identity Anchor", this is a credential that enables participants in supply chains prove their identity and other elements of their claims to others by proving that they are recognized by an authoritative source. In trade and commerce, authoritative sources are those with legal significance in their jurisdiction, organizations that have the authority and responsibility to register company ownership, land ownership, trademark ownership etc.. 

The kind of proofs that may need to be offered in a supply chain interaction include:

1. Organisation identity

2. Land registration 

3. Facility registration

4. Trademark registration

5. Product registration

To be trustworthy, each of these needs to be "anchored" to a legal, authoritative source. 

So for supply chain transparency at scale, we need participants to be able to prove their claims (about who they are, where they have grown crops or mined materials, what transport assets they used etc.) by anchoring these claims to authoritative sources.

This need led to the "Global Trust Registry Project".

(See also the project brief [1])

Aligning with the commitments enshrined in the UN Global Digital Compact (https://www.un.org/global-digital-compact/en), this project is aimed at uplifting trust and integrity as well as equitable inclusion within the global digital and sustainable trade ecosystem.

Identifiers managed by authoritative registers are ubiquitous throughout the global supply chain. For example:

• National (or state level in many cases) government run business registers.

• Land registers that define ownership of a geolocated boundary. Usually state level.

• Trademark registers that manage ownership of brands.

• All kinds of international domain specific registers such as the IMO register of ships or the BIC register of containers.

• An even larger number of national industry specific registers such as the Australian National Livestock Identification System (NLIS).

A general characteristic of these registers is that they are founded within legal frameworks and have robust processes for managing the identity and status of registered members. They are the trusted authority. However, most registers issue paper or PDF registration certificates that are easily forged. While registration is sometimes published on online lists, there is often no easy and crpyotgraphically verifiable way for a registry member (e.g. an Australian business with an Australian Business Number - ABN) to prove that they are the genuine owner of a given identifier.

Leveraging the work already done by the UN/CEFACT UNTP project that has defined a Digital Identity Anchor (DIA) credential, this project will look to generalise the DIA as a digitally verifiable certificate of registration for any authoritative register.

Digitally verifiable evidence of membership will allow, for example a Business to prove their business identity (e.g. a VAT registration number) and link that proof to an issued invoice. So, a verifier will know that the invoice hasn’t been tampered and was genuinely issued by the specified VAT registered entity. This requires that the verifier knows the ID and public key of the issuing registrar. 

There are thousands of authoritative registers around the world and this increases the risk of a malicious party masquerading as an authoritative register using a very similar domain name, for example https://www.bic-code.org/ cf https://www.bic-containers.org. 

To counter this challenge as a "stand-alone" initiative, millions of verifiers would need to maintain an “allow-list” of thousands of authoritative identifier register schemes. This reveals an opportunity to simplify digital verification and reduce risk by maintaining a global register of registrars and registers and providing those registrars with a way to prove their recognition.

This project will develop a UN-hosted trust registry data model and governance framework (possibly like the way UN/LOCODEs are governed) and a pilot implementation of a working trust registry.

Assuming trade documents are issued as verifiable credentials signed by the W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) [2] of the issuer, then all verifiers can follow a simple verification model. 

This list comes from the kick-off presentation deck [1] - also made available on this page.

The Global Trust Registry Project

• Will seek to recognise the government registries that exist, understand their legal and governance framework, what they issue, and if and how they make that digitally accessible

• Will seek to define a data model for registry identifiers that enables interoperability

• Will propose a governance framework for the recognition process

• Will test how the approach can work with existing registries so that 

  • they can prove recognition by UN/CEFACT and 

  • issue their own verifiable identifiers.

• Will develop implementation pilots and guidance

• Will not seek to create a central registry of all things

• Will not issue secondary credentials nor issue credentials on behalf of registries

• Will not (cannot) dictate to nation states what they do, nor how they should do it