A claim about someone else is worth what a stranger can check.
Every company names its partners, its customers and its investors. None of those claims carries a date, an asserter, or the agreement of the party it is about — because the vocabulary the whole web uses has nowhere to put any of the three.
The Directory adds those fields, and one the web cannot express at all — a signature from the other side, verifiable offline from two published keys by a reader who trusts neither party and cannot reach us.
Four rungs
Each one is something a reader can do that they could not do on the rung below. The counts are this estate’s own, read on 30 August 2026.
Rung two is unilateral: any company can publish dated, attributed claims this afternoon without asking a counterparty for anything. Rung three needs the other side, which is why it is rare — and why it is the only rung a competitor cannot reach by scraping harder.
What is here
All of it is live, and all of it runs on anybody’s domain, not only ours.
Why an agent needs this and you do not
A person reading “trusted by” on a website discounts it automatically. The claim is cheap, everybody knows it is cheap, and it costs nothing to make and nothing to ignore.
An agent asked whether one company is really a client of another has no such instinct and no source. It declines, or it invents an answer from a marketing page and passes it downstream as fact. As diligence and sourcing move to agents, an unverifiable claim stops being harmless and becomes a failure with a cost attached.
That is the whole reason this sits on a mesh built for agents rather than in a compliance dashboard.