Governance

Public stewardship, explicit roles, and review signals that never replace wallet choice.

Stewards And Contributors

The Clear Signing initiative is guided by a core steward and developed in collaboration with teams across the ecosystem.

Early groundwork began at Ledger before the initiative broadened across the ecosystem.

Guiding principles

Four governance constraints for a shared initiative that should never become a central trust authority.

Public process

Standards work, shared infrastructure, and guidance should be coordinated in public so the initiative remains legible and accountable to the ecosystem.

Explicit roles

Stewards, maintainers, reviewers, auditors, contributors, and wallets should have distinct responsibilities rather than collapsing coordination and trust into one actor.

Accountable review

Descriptor quality should improve through documented review, independent audit, and visible notes that downstream wallets and users can inspect.

Wallet sovereignty

Governance can coordinate processes and publish signals, but it should not prescribe a single trust policy or a mandatory display decision for every wallet.

Roles & trust signals

The initiative can coordinate a common path in public, but responsibility stays distributed across stewards, reviewers, contributors, and wallets.

Stewards & maintainers

Maintain the specification and shared infrastructure in public, and keep the common path running.

  • Update the standard, registry, and guidance in public.
  • Operate shared submission, review, and publication workflows the ecosystem can reuse.

Reviewers & auditors

Independently assess descriptor quality and publish trust signals that wallets may choose to use.

  • Check descriptors for accuracy, clarity, and misleading edge cases.
  • Publish attestations or review notes that wallets can map into local policy.

Contributors

Protocol teams, wallet teams, researchers, and tooling builders who expand coverage and improve implementations.

  • Add metadata, tests, tooling, and integrations.
  • Report bugs, unclear rendering, and missing transaction patterns.

Wallets

Decide what to render by combining registry metadata with locally trusted review signals.

  • Resolve attestations and choose which external signals to trust.
  • Use those signals to decide what metadata gets rendered at signing time.

Governance coordinates a common path in public; it does not create a single source of truth or override wallet trust policy.