Advancing Trust Infrastructure: Communicating the Value of the vLEI

Key State Capital's CMO on bridging the gap between technical capability and market adoption in digital trust infrastructure

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As one of the leading players in the digital identity space, Key State Capital is committed to enabling the future of trust through verifiable data and digital identity solutions for legal entities. In pursuit of this objective, Key State Capital served as a key sponsor of the GLEIF vLEI Hackathon recently held in New York City. The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) was announced as the winner of the first category of this global initiative - focused on unlocking the potential of digital organizational identity powered by the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) in the financial and digital asset sectors - during the Global Forum at Chainlink's SmartCon in New York on November 3. Clearstream was named runner-up.

This work builds on Key State Capital’s recent efforts to improve clarity and accessibility in the decentralized identity ecosystem, including the launch of the vLEI.wiki MCP server, an open resource dedicated to demystifying the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier by transforming any agentic AI into a vLEI expert, as well as the Web of Trust Map, its accompanying industry report, and API.

In this blog post, we sit down with Ivette Cano, Chief Marketing Officer at Key State Capital, to explore a key question: how do we communicate the value of vLEI in a way that drives global adoption across fragmented regulations, legacy systems, and diverse stakeholders?

How do you communicate vLEI's strategic value to C-suite executives who won't directly interact with it?

Not everyone needs to understand how vLEI works, but decision-makers must understand what vLEI solves that existing systems fundamentally cannot.

Start with problems executives already see every day on their balance sheets: fraud losses from impersonation, operational costs from manual verification processes, deal delays from credential validation bottlenecks, and counterparty risk premiums baked into every transaction. In 2024, Business Email Compromise alone caused an estimated US $2.77 billion in losses across more than 21,000 incidents, and phishing-driven breaches now average US $4.8 million per incident when factoring in investigation, downtime, and remediation. It's estimated that organizations globally also lose roughly 5% of annual revenue to fraud.

vLEI solves this. It provides cryptographic proof of organizational authority that travels with the credential and is verifiable anywhere, without intermediaries. The current alternative (traditional PKI, emails, phone calls, and scanned documents) creates exploitable gaps that manifest as both direct fraud and added inefficiency.

Consider the World Bank's SME finance use case. Credit risk underwriting for small and medium enterprises currently requires expensive aggregation services because verifying business credentials across borders is prohibitively difficult. This technical friction creates two financial realities:

First, existing operations become unnecessarily expensive. Banks price verification uncertainty into every transaction through higher interest rates and intensive due diligence. Second, entire classes of economically viable markets don't exist because counterparty risk can't be priced efficiently.

vLEI changes this equation. When you can cryptographically verify organizational authority without intermediaries, the cost structure of risk assessment fundamentally shifts. Markets that were too expensive to operate become viable. Transactions requiring days of verification can happen in seconds.

What communication strategies overcome the chicken-and-egg problem where market participants wait for critical mass before adopting vLEI, yet critical mass requires early adopters to move first?

A good example comes from container shipping in the 1950s-70s. Before containers, longshoremen had to manually load cargo piece by piece from the trucks onto the ships, making cargo handling catastrophically inefficient. Ships spent weeks in port, and much cargo was lost to theft and damage.

Then came Malcolm McLean with standardized containers in 1956 to cut loading costs by 30x, but adoption was slow because ports, ships, railways, and trucking had to rebuild their infrastructure simultaneously.

The breakthrough came during the Vietnam War when the McLean's company won military contracts to ship containerized cargo to Vietnam and proved containers worked at scale, giving containerization the credibility it needed. Companies then rushed to adopt containers, but because each container had its own size, they became incompatible across ships, ports, cranes, trucks, and rail.

ISO 668 solved this in 1968 by defining universal sizes and corner fittings. That standard triggered rapid network effects, turning containerization into the backbone of world trade we know today.

KERI and vLEI can follow the same pattern: focus on sectors where current pain points are severe enough that organizations will invest in overcoming the onboarding hurdle together. Correspondent banking and supply chain verification are strong candidates because fraud, delays, and manual checks already impose shared, visible costs.

There's precedent for this approach. When Provenant demonstrated measurable fraud reduction in telephony authentication, that constituted empirical validation in a constrained domain, which is far more persuasive than abstract potential implementations.

Once KERI demonstrably solves discrete, well-defined problems across multiple verticals, these become the "easy demos" that facilitate organic spread to adjacent contexts.

How do you craft narratives that resonate across financial institutions, regulators, and technologists without diluting the message or creating confusion about what vLEI fundamentally is?

Speak to your audience and avoid “frankensteining” the message.

The communication challenge isn't to "dumb down" the message, but to translate vLEI's capabilities into vocabulary that connects with their existing knowledge base. Avoid the condescending trap of overexplaining basic concepts within their own fields or assuming ignorance because vLEI is unfamiliar.

All three audiences hate the same thing: organizational impersonation fraud, but they talk about it differently. Make sure you’re speaking to your audience. The best way to do this is to have a team that can fluently translate between these spheres. Don't make the CTO explain to regulators or your compliance officers explain to developers.

It’s also essential to create and keep ready separate materials for each audience, as well as a synthesis document for cross-functional teams.

Here’s a glimpse of what that looks like in practice:

Communication Element	Financial Institutions	Regulators	Technologists
Core Value Proposition	"Fraud-proof identity that reduces compliance costs and settlement risk"	"Creates an auditable trail of all organizational authorizations without concentrating regulatory liability.”	"First production-ready self-sovereign organizational identity with quantum resistance."
Metrics	"Reduces KYC onboarding from weeks to minutes, cuts compliance costs by X%"	"X% reduction in fraud and Y% increase in market participation"	"Cryptographically verifiable credentials with key rotation and recovery."
Risk Framing	"The real risk is continuing with systems that incentivize fraud."	"The real risk is having no tools to verify organizational authority."	"The real risk is building on infrastructure that can't survive a key compromise."
Technical Depth	Focus on operational benefits, cost reduction, and new client expansion	Emphasize oversight capability and systemic integrity	Provide technical architecture and cryptographic guarantees.

KERI and vLEI present a steep learning curve with over 30 technical abbreviations and complex cryptographic concepts that even experienced developers struggle with. This knowledge barrier has become one of the biggest obstacles to the broader adoption of vLEI. GLEIF has made significant progress here through its vLEI training programs, which provide professionals with structured frameworks to build their understanding.

For teams looking to accelerate their learning process, our recently published vlei.wiki MCP server offers a complementary approach. Built on the Model Context Protocol, it transforms AI assistants like Claude or Cursor into interactive KERI and vLEI tutors, grounded in official specifications and ecosystem documentation.

How do you communicate vLEI's value proposition in a way that overcomes institutional inertia, especially when decision-makers have built careers around existing systems and may perceive change as risk rather than opportunity?

Full KERI adoption ultimately means replacing existing PKI infrastructure, but you don’t need to replace everything at once.

Target two opportunities first:

1. Sectors where existing PKI creates acute, measurable pain. Healthcare is a good example: ransomware attacks, breaches, and vulnerabilities create losses significant enough to justify infrastructure investment.
   
   One key example of this is best advanced by one of our portfolio companies, HealthKERI. By providing a KERI-based wrapper for Healthcare Information Exchanges’ infrastructure, CIOs can interact with traditional systems via the same interfaces and gateways they are used to, with the added benefit of Zero-Trust-encrypted transport of sensitive medical data. They have even created an agentic interface for technical experts and executives alike to set up secure endpoints for data exchange, all without ever exposing Personal Identifiable Information.

2. Contexts where no adequate trust infrastructure existed before. Provenant used KERI-based verification to stop telecom fraud in an area with no solid identity tools. Nothing had to be replaced, and legacy PKI couldn’t solve the issue.

It's worth emphasizing that while much discussion around vLEI centers on financial services and regulatory compliance, KERI, in combination with vLEI, addresses fundamental cybersecurity and trust issues across all IT infrastructure. The value proposition extends to supply chain verification, IoT device authentication, critical infrastructure protection, and any domain where cryptographic proof of organizational authority matters. Key State Capital's report vLEI - The Rise of Organizational Digital Identity examines these broader applications and how KERI's architecture avoids platform lock-in while acknowledging that long-term adoption requires infrastructure evolution.

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