Cardano Foundation tokenizes Veridian shares under CIP-0113
Tech & Launches ·
The Foundation spun out its digital-identity venture and issued its equity as programmable securities on Cardano, marking the standard's first disclosed deployment.
On 8 October 2026, the Cardano Foundation announced that Veridian had been separated out as a standalone company and that its shares were issued on Cardano under the CIP-0113 proposal, structured as ledger-based securities recognized under Switzerland's DLT Act, according to defiprime.com. The Foundation characterized this equity issuance as the first asset of its kind put onto the Cardano network.
Veridian itself is a digital-identity firm, led by chief executive Thomas A. Mayfield, that had been incubated within the Cardano Foundation for three years before this spinout. Its core function is issuing credentials to people, organizations and software agents, with the ability to verify or revoke those credentials without depending on a centralized identity system.
The mechanics behind the tokenized shares rest on CIP-0113's attempt to solve a known gap in how native Cardano tokens behave: once minted, they can typically move freely between wallets, which conflicts with the compliance needs of regulated securities, such as allowlists, denylists or customer-verification checks. Rather than altering Cardano through a hard fork, the proposal layers restrictions on top of existing primitives. An on-chain registry tracks each token's policy alongside the hashes of its governing scripts, while a shared validation layer checks live protocol settings before permitting any transfer. Issuers then define their own rules through separate transfer, issuance, and optional third-party action scripts, covering functions like minting conditions, forced transfers, or freezing a token altogether.
This arrangement gives the proposal, which remains in proposed status following an update on 29 September 2026, a concrete use case tied to real securities rather than a theoretical framework. Coverage of the development is also included in leviathan.news's tracking of Cardano-related activity, with two distinct sources currently covering the cluster.
What remains unclear is when, or whether, CIP-0113 will move beyond proposed status into formal adoption, and whether additional issuers will follow Veridian in using the standard for tokenized securities on Cardano.