PRI4
No trusted intermediary
Verification requires no trusted intermediary: any authorised party — including a regulator — validates any proof for itself, offline if needed, from the artifact alone; no participant has to take another’s word, and no callback to the prover is required.
Rationale
When every authorised party can check a proof for itself, no one has to take another’s word and no bottleneck sits between a claim and its acceptance — which speeds up audits, settlements and approvals and removes a single point of failure. The independence is between parties: holder, counterparty and regulator each verify for themselves. It applies to verification, while the data’s origin — the issuer who attests to it — and the schema’s governance remain explicit, inspectable trust roles, so this principle complements rather than replaces the accountability those roles carry.
Implications
- You — and any regulator — verify entirely on your own systems with no dependency on a central authority; because the verification parameters come from public, reproducible procedures, checking a proof for yourself is genuinely self-sufficient and never quietly relocates trust onto whoever chose them.
- The trust relationships that remain — the issuer who vouches for the data’s origin, and whoever governs the schema it is checked against — are named openly in every artifact, so who stood behind the data and its rules stays visible and answerable rather than buried in the process.
- A single proof can be relied on by any number of parties within the context and validity window built into it, so you prove once and reuse — cutting repeated disclosure and duplicated checking across a supply chain or approval workflow.