HVC — HEART Verification Credential

An HVC is a cryptographically secured, scoped attestation resulting from an authorized positive certification decision under the HEART Conformity Assessment Scheme. It says what was positively determined, about which subject, within what scope, version, limitations, and status conditions.

Three-document boundary

Document	Governing question
HVC Specification v4.0	What was positively determined, about what subject, within what scope and limitations?
HVC W3C Verifiable Credential Technical Profile v1.0	How may that claim be serialized, secured, and machine-verified?
HEART Registry Specification v1.0	What is its current status, authority, and historical lineage?

An HVC is not a score, tier, purchasable badge, training certificate, professional credential, deployment license, legal approval, regulatory authorization, safety guarantee, universal trust score, or ISO certification.

Verification is multi-part

A verifier separately checks document syntax, proof, issuer identity and authority, decision authority, time, Registry state and freshness, lineage, scope applicability, limitations, and the relying party’s policy. Cryptographic proof validity alone does not establish substantive conformity.

HVC v4.0 has no universal Gold, Silver, Bronze, BGF, or Phi encoding. Only ACTIVE and the expressly positive part of QUALIFIED may be presented as current positive conformity.

Operating boundary

HVC semantics and its W3C technical profile are current specifications. Production issuance additionally requires authorized bodies and keys, published contexts and schemas, conformance and security testing, and operational Registry services. This site does not represent those production dependencies as live.