Reference Architecture
The PTI reference architecture describes how trust is generated, exchanged, resolved, and consumed across institutional boundaries. These pages are informative companions to the normative Specification v1.0.
Architectural intent
Portable Trust Infrastructure separates three concerns that traditional credit and identity systems often conflate:
- Signal production: partners and verifiers attest real-world activity.
- Trust fabric operations: registry, exchange, graph, and intelligence derivation.
- Decision-time consumption: institutions request context-scoped trust intelligence.
Component catalogue
| Page | Topic |
|---|---|
| Trust Flow | End-to-end signal and lookup flow |
| Trust Lifecycle | States from event ingest to report expiry |
| Trust Graph | Nodes, edges, and temporal relationships |
| Trust Signals | Normalized activity representations |
| Trust Evidence | Documents, endorsements, and attestations |
| Trust Assertions | Signed claims about subjects |
| Trust Events | Canonical ingest unit |
| Trust Producers | Organizations that emit signals |
| Trust Consumers | Institutions that run lookups |
| Trust Exchange | Routing and policy enforcement layer |
| Trust Registry | Identity directory and catalogs |
| Trust Resolution | Matching partner entities to pti_id |
| Trust Intelligence Engine | Scoring, confidence, explainability |
| Trust APIs | Integration surfaces for each role |
Trust contexts
Contexts partition the trust graph into life-area scopes (e.g., lending, rental, employment) and cross-cutting lens views (e.g., risk compliance, digital platform). See Trust Context Catalogue for the documented context map.
Planes vs components
| Plane | Components |
|---|---|
| Production | Producers, ingest gateways, event normalizers |
| Fabric | Registry, exchange, graph store, intelligence engine |
| Consumption | Lookup APIs, verification, policy gateway |
Physical deployments may colocate components, but logical separation remains required for security and governance.
Reading paths
Integrators (producers): Trust Producers → Trust Events → Trust Exchange → Trust APIs
Integrators (consumers): Trust Consumers → Trust Resolution → Trust Intelligence Engine → Trust APIs
Architects: Trust Flow → Trust Graph → Trust Registry → Specification Architecture