Open trust infrastructure for Africa's informal economy.
Across Africa, millions of economic actors, market traders, artisans, micro-merchants, and cooperative members have years of real, demonstrable capability. Consistent revenue. Community reputation. Proven reliability. None of it is legible to any capital provider, fintech, or institution outside their immediate context. Zivana exists to fix that. Zivana is an open Layer 2 protocol built on Cardano and Midnight that issues holder-owned trust credentials derived from verified on-chain activity. Revenue attestations, covenant performance, peer validation. These credentials are portable, privacy-preserving via zero-knowledge proofs on Midnight, and composable. Any application can read from or write to the protocol without owning the identity data. The protocol does not prescribe how value flows downstream. That is left to the application layer. The protocol is being built in public. Every technology choice is being validated independently through a dedicated repository before core protocol logic is written. Cardano and Aiken for eUTxO settlement and the $ZVN token. Midnight and Compact for shielded covenants and selective disclosure. Hyperledger Identus for W3C-compliant DID credentials. Orcfax and Charli3 for revenue attestation. ASI Cloud and Fetch.ai for market benchmarking and anomaly detection. The Zivana contributor portal is live at zivana.network. Developers, researchers, writers, and community builders are already earning verified points for completed work. Every contribution is reviewed, recorded on the portal, and attributed to the contributor's public profile. This is not a bounty board. It is the first layer of the protocol proving itself: trust made visible through verifiable participation. Sovela, the MSME financial inclusion platform, is the genesis application of the Zivana Protocol.