This year, we welcome a new chair, vice chair, and four new members to the LF Decentralized Trust Technical Advisory Council (TAC). The 11 members of the TAC, elected under the charter of LF Decentralized Trust, provide the technical governance across the LF Decentralized Trust (LFDT) ecosystem. The members are each leaders in one or more of the projects hosted by LFDT. They contribute their time as TAC members to steward the technical vision for LFDT and ensure transparency, consistency, and collaboration across projects.
Arun S M, who has served as vice chair for the last three years, first for Hyperledger Foundation and then LFDT, was chosen by the TAC members to take up the reins as the 2026 chair. Hendrik Ebbers, now in his second year as a TAC member, steps into the vice chair role.
We asked Arun* and Hendrik a few questions about what to expect in 2025. Read on for their insights and ambitions for the year ahead:
[Arun] First, congratulations to the entire LFDT ecosystem on completing 10 years and to every contributor, maintainer, end user, and partner who kept building. Many of today’s critical digital foundations exist because open communities like ours did the hard, often invisible work together.
As we prepare for the next wave, where technology evolves faster than our vocabulary, the trust stays at the center. There’s a saying from India that translates to: we trust the earth beneath our feet to carry us through the journey. In the same way, societies will only step confidently into a digital future if the trust infrastructure beneath them is solid, transparent, and resilient.
In the age of GenAI, I don’t just want an answer; I want to know how it knows. Provenance, verifiability, and accountability matter more than ever. We’ve all seen stories about fabricated citations or false case references making their way into real decisions. Our job is to ensure the infrastructure of trust is worthy of the trust placed in it. Trust is not a slogan; it’s a system of proof. If we do our work well, people won’t have to assume trust. They’ll verify it.
To everyone who has contributed so far, “thank you.” To those considering joining, “there’s no better time.” Let’s build the foundation the world can stand on.
[Arun] Three things will keep LFDT ahead:
All three depend on LFDT’s neutral governance and open collaboration model. That’s what keeps innovation aligned, avoids fragmentation, and ensures the ecosystem moves forward as a cohesive whole.
[Hendrik] In short, we need standards, trust, and security. Let me explain this in more detail.
Within LFDT, we develop vendor-neutral specifications that allow systems to be combined, exchanged, and integrated without falling into vendor lock-in. Through wider adoption, these specifications must evolve into effective standards so they can be used as reliable building blocks for industry, governments, and individuals alike.
Projects such as the EU Digital Identity Wallet and DID specifications at the W3C demonstrate how important the foundation we are building together has become. It forms a critical basis for many initiatives that now directly affect people worldwide.
It is essential that these standards create trust. This trust can only be achieved through vendor-neutral, open, and distributed systems, where no single company controls the wallets of all citizens or the payment infrastructure of a country.
Given the scale and sensitivity of the data involved in these projects, it is clear that security is another fundamental pillar that will contribute to the long-term success of the LFDT ecosystem.
[Arun] Neutral technical governance is the foundation of credible trust infrastructure. People want real guarantees. Not just that the code is open, but that the project is accountable, sustainable, and guided by a neutral body rather than a single organization with shifting priorities.
Many assume that a project “built in the open” automatically provides those guarantees. It doesn’t. An open repo on its own can still lose maintainers, make opaque decisions, or drift without a stable roadmap.
LFDT addresses this by putting projects inside a clear governance structure that defines how they move through lifecycle stages, how decisions are made, what transparency looks like, and how security and review processes are handled. You can see this in the TAC’s work over the past year: refining lifecycle guidelines, creating task forces on contributor ladders and security artifact signing, and maintaining regular project reviews to keep everything healthy and predictable.
Neutral governance also protects the ecosystem from the traps that slow trust technologies down such as proprietary silos, incompatible approaches, and fragmentation that undermines interoperability. LFDT’s role is to give diverse stakeholders a place to build together, where standards and implementations evolve through consensus rather than any one organization’s agenda.
The result is simple but important: continuity, transparency, open processes, and a roadmap shaped by the community as a whole.
[Hendrik] To implement meaningful specifications and eventually establish standards, collaboration is essential. A specification makes little sense if there is only a single user of that definition.
This is why it is so important that companies come together in foundations like the Linux Foundation and LFDT and collaboratively develop these specifications under shared governance rules.
This model not only allows the major players in our ecosystem to collaborate and exchange ideas, but it also enables startups to work on equal footing with companies such as IBM or Google, since LFDT’s governance model grants the same rights to all entities — whether they are small companies, large corporations, or individual contributors — when it comes to maintaining projects.
This approach prevents silos and proprietary approaches and instead enables remarkable innovation through the diversity of the community. All of this is made possible by a steward like LFDT, whose governance framework provides a neutral space where everyone can collaborate.
[Arun] The TAC is the custodian of coherence and confidence for the LFDT ecosystem. Our goal is simple: make it safe and straightforward for governments, enterprises, and builders to adopt LFDT projects at scale.
In functional practice, the TAC handles both high‑level guidance and the detailed operational work that turns ideas into dependable building blocks:
For the full formal responsibilities, these are documented at: https://lf-decentralized-trust.github.io/governance/member-info/tac-responsibilities/
[Hendrik] From my perspective, the TAC has several important roles.
First, I would like to return to the key themes mentioned earlier: standards, trust, and security. The TAC must ensure that these values are actively upheld within LFDT projects. For this reason, the TAC conducts project reviews and supports projects when challenges or questions arise. It also defines guidelines on topics such as technical security and project diversity.
Beyond that, one of the TAC’s responsibilities is to connect the different projects within the ecosystem. Even when a project successfully develops meaningful and open specifications within a diverse team, it can still end up operating in a silo. The TAC therefore actively works to build bridges between projects.
A third important role is mentorship. The TAC develops best practices for projects to help them build diverse and growing communities, with recurring contributors and maintainers from many different backgrounds.
[Hendrik] The range of topics within LFDT has expanded significantly.
While a few years ago the conversation largely revolved around the buzzword “blockchain,” today the focus includes areas such as digital identity, private and public distributed ledgers, zero-knowledge proofs, and post-quantum cryptography. These topics are actively discussed within LFDT and are already being addressed through several projects.
This demonstrates how closely LFDT operates at the core of emerging technologies, but it also shows how difficult it is to predict the future.
I hope that future projects will focus on bringing these areas together through meaningful specifications, ultimately enabling the development of global standards.
Another promising area is collaboration with adjacent initiatives such as the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which is working on specifications for agentic commerce and agentic identity. Cooperation between these ecosystems could lead to very interesting projects.
At the same time, LFDT Labs allows us to onboard entirely new ideas and experiment with emerging concepts. I am very curious to see what the next project will be that none of us saw coming.
[Arun] As we entered into 2026, the TAC spent time reflecting on where the ecosystem is headed and how to prepare. For 2026, my priorities are clear:
The TAC’s set goals, full notes and discussions are open here: https://github.com/LF-Decentralized-Trust/governance/discussions/287
And I encourage every member, contributor, and project to take part. Your insights genuinely shape our direction.
[Hendrik] As the scope of topics within LFDT continues to grow, the TAC must help create clear structure and orientation for the ecosystem. It should be easy for external observers to understand where individual LFDT projects fit, how they can be used, and what their respective strengths are.
One of my priorities is therefore to work together with LFDT to create a more consistent and accessible presentation of all projects.
Another key priority is strengthening the connections between projects. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, technologies and projects require many different interfaces and integration points. The TAC should help bring projects together so they can be effectively used across a wide range of ecosystems.
At the LFDT Member Summit and the LFDT Maintainer Days earlier this year, the first important steps toward deeper collaboration between projects were already taken. I hope to continue building on this momentum throughout 2026.
[Hendrik] The coming year offers significant opportunities for the LFDT ecosystem. One of the most promising aspects is the growing global focus on digital trust infrastructure. Topics such as digital identity, decentralized credentials, zero-knowledge technologies, and post-quantum cryptography are rapidly moving from research and experimentation into real-world deployments. This creates a strong opportunity for LFDT projects and specifications to become foundational building blocks for global standards.
Another opportunity lies in the increasing collaboration between ecosystems. As technologies such as distributed ledgers, identity systems, and emerging areas like agentic AI begin to intersect, the need for open and interoperable standards becomes even more critical. LFDT is well positioned to act as a neutral environment where these technologies can evolve together rather than in isolation.
However, there are also potential pitfalls. One major risk is fragmentation. If ecosystems, standards bodies, or projects develop similar solutions independently without coordination, we risk creating competing approaches that reduce interoperability and slow down adoption.
Another challenge is maintaining trust and security at scale. As these technologies become part of critical infrastructure — for governments, businesses, and individuals — expectations around security, transparency, and governance increase significantly. Ensuring that projects maintain high standards in these areas will be essential.
Finally, it will be important to continue building diverse and active communities around the projects. Open ecosystems thrive when contributors from different backgrounds, organizations, and regions collaborate. Maintaining this openness and diversity will be key to sustaining innovation and long-term success within LFDT.
*Disclaimer from Arun: My comments and opinions are provided in my personal capacity and not as a representative of my employer. They do not reflect the views of my employer and are not endorsed by my employer.
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Here’s the full list of the 2026 LF Decentralized Trust TAC members:
Marcus Brandenburger
Hendrik Ebbers (Vice Chair)
Kanchan Kaur+
Enrique Lacal
Kevin Millikin+
Diane Mueller
Arun S M (Chair)
Osama Rabea+
Venkatraman Ramakrishna
Yoav Tock+
Matt Whitehead
+New members
The TAC meets weekly, and all are welcome. To get the details on TAC calls, go here. Or join the conversation #tac channel in Discord.