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A Primer on KERI, ACDCs, and CESR

Practitioner informative

Maintainer: Daniel Hardman · 2025-12-19 · checked 2026-10-15

An introductory paper by Daniel Hardman that explains the three layers of the KERI suite: Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI) for identifiers and key state, Authentic Chained Data Containers (ACDCs) for verifiable data, and Composable Event Streaming Representation (CESR) for encoding. It starts from the weaknesses of administrative public key infrastructure (PKI) and walks through each layer's mechanisms with worked examples. Written for engineers and technically literate readers new to the suite.

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