Institutions & government.

Adunai is non-state Digital Public Infrastructure for African economic life: a foundation-stewarded protocol substrate of identity, attestations, reputation, compliance, payments, and savings primitives, designed for partnership with African institutions rather than around them. Integration is arms-length. It does not require an institutional counterpart to cede sovereignty.

The peer reference is India Stack (Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker), EU eIDAS, Singapore SingPass, and Brazil PIX/DREX: each a public substrate on which a generation of commercial and civic applications compose. Each of those is operated by a single sovereign coordinator within one jurisdiction. Africa cannot follow that path, because no single government can legitimately steward identity, payments, and trust rails for citizens of fifty-three other nations, and fifty-four states cannot coordinate at the velocity infrastructure work requires. Adunai occupies the complementary space: open, permissionless substrate that any builder in any jurisdiction can compose against, foundation-stewarded so no single state or commercial operator controls it. See the whitepaper for the full architecture.

What the Foundation does not do

The bounded-authority discipline is the substantive condition for institutional partnership. Charter Article VIII enumerates the limits. The Foundation may not:

• Issue currency. Local-currency stablecoins (cXAF, cNGN, cKES) are a Phase 3 trajectory, issued by authorized licensed partners under central bank oversight, not by the Foundation. Foreign-currency stablecoins (USDC, USDT, EURC) are integrated through their existing issuers; the Foundation does not compete with those issuers.
• Replace central banks or assert authority over monetary policy. The posture is structural partnership with monetary authorities, not displacement.
• Custody user funds. Users hold their own keys and control their own DIDs. The Treasury holds protocol fee receipts, not user balances.
• Operate fiat. The Foundation does not run mobile-money bridges, agent networks, or licensed payment infrastructure. Licensed partners do that under their existing regulatory frameworks.
• Freeze, reverse, or censor user transactions, or access user private keys.
• Act over user-controlled state. Recovery, abandonment, and linkage primitives are role-free by code. GuardianRegistry and AbandonmentRegistry are non-upgradeable, non-pausable, and role-free by design.
• Favor specific builders. No commercial builder holds contract-level privilege or preferential grant treatment. The Foundation holds no equity in any builder. No one picks winners.

A central bank engaging Adunai is not handing currency-issuance authority to a foundation: the central bank issues, a licensed partner mints against reserves under its oversight, and the Foundation provides only the contract substrate. An identity authority is not delegating identity issuance: it remains the credential issuer, and the attestation surface records its signed claims.

Institutional verification, the tick

The base AttestationsRegistry is permissionless: anyone can issue attestations against a DID, with a per-schema issuance policy (open, accredited, or restricted) controlling who may attest each schema. Institutional verification, the visual tick on a verified handle in HandleRegistry and the regulatory weight of a national-ID-derived attestation, is Foundation-gated under Charter §8.4. An identity authority, bank, or ministry becomes an accredited verifier through a published accreditation process, retains its existing authority to issue or revoke credentials in its own systems, and gains an on-chain attestation surface that relying parties verify cryptographically without contacting the authority for each check.

One nuance on consent: benign identity-scoped attestations require the subject's EIP-712 consent. Regulatory and adverse records (AML, sanctions, PEP screening) and authoritative negatives are issued without subject consent by design. The consent gate protects benign claims; it does not shield anyone from lawful compliance records.

Central-bank partnership posture

Adunai works with African monetary authorities, not around them. In a Phase 3 partnership the central bank issues, a licensed partner mints against reserves the central bank oversees, and Adunai provides the substrate on which that stablecoin operates. RateOracle supports treaty pegs (for example a fixed CEMAC XAF-to-EUR peg) for cross-border arithmetic alongside market rates. The substrate offers real-time on-chain transparency into flows in a given currency, programmable compliance screening via ComplianceCompleteness, and travel-rule attribution via TravelRule. It is complementary to bank-to-bank rails, which settle at the regulated-institution layer while Adunai serves the application layer downstream.

AfCFTA alignment

Intra-African trade is the primary use case. The AfCFTA framework is the treaty commitment to a continental free trade area; Adunai is the architectural complement, open substrate on which AfCFTA-aligned commerce tooling composes without each builder negotiating fifty-four bilateral integrations. The relevant primitives are the institutional attester model (banks issuing member-institution attestations), the rate substrate, the compliance cascade, and the payment rail. Adunai aligns with the AU Digital Transformation Strategy and the Smart Africa coordination agenda without requiring either to operate the substrate.

Integration patterns by category

Each category retains its systems and authority; Adunai provides composable primitives it consumes or extends; integration is arms-length, with no token holding required.

• National identity authorities integrate as credential issuers via institutional handle tiers and the accredited-verifier model. They retain full issuance authority and revocation rights; they gain a cryptographically verifiable presence in pan-African DPI without exposing citizen data beyond what they choose to attest.
• Embassies and foreign agencies integrate as relying parties using the OAuth-pattern "Sign in with Adunai." An applicant grants scoped access to specific attestations through consent-gated selective disclosure; the embassy verifies against its own trust policy. See Sign in with Adunai.
• Banks and payment service providers integrate as institutional attesters (issuing account, KYC-tier, and transaction-history claims) and as relying parties consuming attestations from other accredited attesters. Regulatory posture is unaffected; the roles are additive.
• Mobile-money operators integrate as registered agents via AgentRegistry for cash-in and cash-out, and as attesters for phone and SIM-registration schemas. The Foundation does not custody fiat or operate mobile-money infrastructure.
• NGOs and international institutions engage as disbursement substrate for cash-transfer and refugee-identity programmes, and as policy partners. Charter isolation between Foundation authority and user-controlled state is what makes this credible: the Foundation cannot later freeze, revoke, or surveil the DIDs a programme issues.

Governance and current state

Changes move through an RFC with a 14-day comment window, review by the Technical Advisory Council, a 5-of-9 vote of the nine-signer multi-sig (three directors, three technical advisors, three ecosystem representatives), and a 14-day timelock. A bounded 7-of-9 emergency pause is capped at 14 days. On-chain voting is a Year-3 direction, not a live mechanism.

Honest Phase 0 status: 35 contracts are live on Base Sepolia testnet as of 2026-07-01 (34 of 35 source-verified), and the code is pre-audit. A single external audit of the complete v1 system gates mainnet; nothing is "audited" as a completed state, and there is no mainnet. The five-token whitelist (USDC, USDT, EURC, cbBTC, WETH) is live in ProtocolConfig; payment routing ships dormant and arms only through a 14-day timelock. The protocol fee is 0.05%. The Foundation is pre-formation (Mauritius intended, subject to counsel). The SDK is in-repo (Apache-2.0), not yet on npm. Ecosystem grants are launching with no awards yet. There are no real users, no volume, and no active institutional partnerships to represent. Review the contract registry, the Foundation Charter, and Security & audits before engaging.

The inquiry path

1. Initial conversation. Establish mutual context: the counterpart's mandate, the Foundation's substrate scope and bounded authority, the integration category. No commitment or NDA required; the substrate is open-source.
2. Technical review. The counterpart's team reviews the whitepaper, charter, contract architecture, and audit posture. Live testnet contracts are independently inspectable.
3. Scope definition. Define the specific primitives, schemas, and jurisdictional posture, with the counterpart's systems and authority remaining primary.
4. Integration plan. Milestones the counterpart owns; substrate dependencies the Foundation owns.
5. Execution. On testnet during Phase 0; on mainnet only after the external audit closes and the legal entity activates.

The Foundation will not frame Adunai as a competitor to central banks, a replacement for the African financial system, or a savior, and will not represent operational state it does not have. Partnership is a continuing engagement at institutional cadence, not a raise to be closed.