notes: events/talks/kericonf26-04-davis-contract-credentials

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events/talks/kericonf26-04-davis-contract-credentials Cole Davis: Contract Credentials and Verifiable Identity (KERIConf 2026) summary v0.1 — 2026-10-15: drafted by Claude from the curated transcript; unread by Mark; marked partner on Mark's word 2026-10-21, paraphrase only, no quotation partner 834 # Cole Davis: Contract Credentials and Verifiable Identity (KERIConf 2026) **Abstract.** Cole Davis, founder of Switchchord, a legal technology and digital identity company in the music industry, presented the idea of a contract credential: a verifiable credential derived directly from a legal contract, so that a party can prove what it has the contractual authority to do. He walked through a commercial lease example built on KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) identifiers and ACDCs (Authentic Chained Data Containers), showed a simulated demonstration, and took questions. The talk suits readers interested in authority, delegation and legal workflows. ## Summary Davis opened by describing his background as a corporate and entertainment lawyer running Switchchord, a brand under an IP (intellectual property) holding company, Steamroller Systems, that applies machine learning and decentralized identity to legal workflows. For years he had wanted a dual root of trust for contractual authority: a legal root and a cryptographic root, bound together. He looked first at blockchains and then at W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) DIDs (decentralized identifiers) and VCs (verifiable credentials), and found KERI in 2021, chiefly because it needs no underlying ledger. He observed that credentials usually prove who someone is, rarely what they are authorized to do under a contract. He described a contract credential as one that shows, for example, that an officer may sign documents above a set amount by board authority, or that an employee may enter a building because the employer holds a lease. Today the contract and the operational authority it confers live in separate systems; he proposed collapsing them so the contract is the credential. He tied this to Ronald Coase's idea of transaction costs. His route to KERI came from modeling a copyright co-owned by four music companies. A ledger-based DID method would have required every owner to interact with a blockchain to rotate keys; KERI lets each party manage its own key state while a full chain of title can still be composed. He described ACDCs as better suited than W3C VCs for this use, citing the rule section for legal prose, the attribute section for structured deal points, edges for chaining, and revocation through a TEL (transaction event log) anchored to a KEL (key event log). The worked example used a real commercial lease from the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) EDGAR system. The building, the lessor and the lessee each have an AID (autonomic identifier). Marked-up prose populates the ACDC attribute section, the whole object is signed, and the lessee derives an access credential from the lease using the I2I (Issuer-To-Issuee) edge operator, under which the issuer of the new ACDC must be the issuee of the one it points to, possibly onward to employees. A smart lock that knows only the building's AID can admit any valid, unrevoked credential referencing it, without a central registry. Graduated disclosure lets the lock see access authority but not rent, while an auditor may see more; he suggested the same could support cryptographic redaction in litigation or arbitration. If the lease is terminated, the lessor's revocation event in its TEL causes every downstream access credential to fail, and he extended this to employment: when someone leaves, all derived authority fails at once. A board-consent example showed authority to sign up to a set amount, chained to an employment credential. He then showed a simulated demonstration, built quickly with AI coding tools, following the ACDC specification without running the real KERI stack. In questions he discussed user experience, the earlier Switchchord product and why it struggled for adoption, physical-security savings, enforceability (the legal prose contract remains the base, so disputes can still go to a judge or arbitrator), and explaining KERI to non-technical audiences. ## Key terms contract credential, dual root of trust, authority gap, ACDC rule section, attribute section, edges, I2I operator, NI2I operator, digital twin, graduated disclosure ## Claims and their evidence - A credential derived from a contract can carry a one-to-one mapping to the contract, its counterparties and any asset it concerns. [informative] - Revoking an upstream credential through its TEL makes every credential chained to it fail verification, so termination of a lease or employment cuts off derived access at once. [informative] - A verifier such as a smart lock needs only the building's AID, not an access list, to check presented credentials. [informative] - Switchchord's earlier music-industry product, which used W3C VCs to link songwriters and publishers, was ahead of its market, and one of its features is now drawing interest. [presenter-reported] - The demonstration shown was a simulation built to the ACDC specification, not a deployment on the KERI stack. [presenter-reported] ## Related ACDC specification (IETF draft), vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier) credentials from GLEIF (Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation), including the QVI (Qualified vLEI Issuer), legal entity, role and ECR (engagement context role) credentials; W3C DIDs and VCs; did:webs. ## Provenance Drafted by Claude on 2026-10-15 from the curated transcript (04-cole-davis-contract-credentials-verifiable-identity.md), all 39 minutes read. No quotations; paraphrase only. Not yet read by Mark.

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