Two LF Decentralized Trust communities — the ToIP/DIF Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group and the OpenVTC lab — demonstrated the first verifiable trust community (VTC) for open-source projects at the Linux Plumbers Conference and LF Open Source Summit EU in Prague, per the Linux Foundation.

OpenVTC lead maintainer Glenn Gore, CEO of Affinidi, walked attendees through setting up a new VTC for an example open-source project using the OpenVTC CLI.

The Linux Foundation reports the demo was enthusiastically received, with some attendees wanting to put OpenVTC to work on their own projects immediately.

The Linux Foundation says the milestone traces to a challenge from LF CEO Jim Zemlin eighteen months ago at the Member Summit in Napa, where he asked LFDT members to protect open-source projects from two growing dangers: malware injection attacks and the flood of AI-generated pull requests.

The Linux Foundation reports that existing solutions like the PGP/GPG web of trust used by the Linux kernel were deemed too slow, too hard to use, and too difficult to scale. The response was a new trust model called a decentralized trust graph (DTG), with the VTC at its heart.

The malware-injection risk is not hypothetical.

IBM's Red Hat blog, in its Open Source Security Signals Q3 2026 report, describes the December 2024 compromise of the Python project Ultralytics, where attackers got into the project's GitHub Actions build environment and injected malicious code into packages published to PyPI — code that was never present in the public GitHub source.

IBM reports that PyPI's Trusted Publishing, provenance attestations, and transparency logs helped investigators trace the malicious packages to the legitimate workflow and ultimately to the GitHub Actions cache.

According to the Linux Foundation, the DTG open standards are defined by the DTGWG, and three verifiable credentials define the graph itself.

Verifiable relationship credentials (VRCs) are exchanged peer to peer — the Linux Foundation notes a kernel-style two-maintainer key signing can now happen by scanning a QR code. Verifiable membership credentials (VMCs) are issued by the VTC once membership policies are met.

Verifiable delegation credentials (VDCs) let an AI agent prove it is acting on behalf of a human, for example when submitting a pull request.

The Linux Foundation reports that every VTC can define its membership and governance policies in Rego, the declarative language behind the CNCF's Open Policy Agent, and Gore showed Rego policies for a Linux-kernel-style community, including appointing vetters to check government-issued credentials of new contributors.

Brendan Miller and Alberto Leon of the Harvard Applied Technology Lab then demonstrated their open-source Keyring mobile app streamlining the whole vetter-to-contributor approval flow.

The demo also showed automated repo management: a maintainer's trust agent can verify a PR came from a verified community member — or an agent verifiably delegated by one — or auto-close it.

The motivation for both the DTGWG and OpenVTC now is completing a fully verifiable trust network (VTN) that works across Linux Foundation projects — and eventually across all open-source projects following the DTG open standards, the Linux Foundation says.

The demo landed at a summit where, as The Register reports, open-source supply-chain security was a running theme, with Dell and Microsoft discussing OpenSSF catalogs such as CRABFOSC to help companies meet the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Machine-verifiable community trust would slot directly into that compliance push. Project materials live at openvtc.net and github.com › OpenVTC.