Independent Swiss association takes first steps toward running Bluesky's PLC ledger

The Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) Organization has formally come into existence and begun the administrative groundwork required to independently operate the identity directory behind Bluesky and the wider AT Protocol network, according to the organization's announcement, which surfaced on the Hacker News front page.

The entity fulfills a commitment made roughly a year ago by Bluesky Social PBC, which said it would help establish an independent home for the directory rather than keep the infrastructure under corporate control indefinitely.

What the ledger actually does

The PLC directory collects and distributes updates for AT Protocol accounts. Each account is tied to a decentralized identifier, a random-looking string such as did:plc:i65vdx4ylh5ahdjyd7f2gpnp, and record updates cover details like the account's handle (for instance @plcred.org) and which Personal Data Server hosts the account's data.

A central design property, per the announcement, is that updates are signed with cryptographic keys the directory itself does not hold. That means the server running the ledger cannot alter the records it publishes. When a person signs up through bsky.app, the initial keys are held on their behalf by Bluesky Social PBC; an account created on mu.social or eurosky.tech starts with keys managed by the Eurosky PDS instead.

Users are not locked into whichever arrangement they started with. They can rotate the keys controlling their PLC identity whenever they choose, substitute keys generated on their own devices, or register brand-new account identifiers from scratch.

A member-governed legal entity

The new operator is a registered Swiss association, a structure the organization describes as an independent legal entity governed by its members under Swiss law, with no owners or shareholders and no purpose of enriching those members. Its stated mission is providing public identity infrastructure for users of Internet applications.

The initial board mixes protocol engineering, cryptography, and internet governance backgrounds. Richard Barnes co-founded Let's Encrypt and previously led security teams at Mozilla and Cisco. Thyla van der Merwe leads cryptography and formal verification work at Google and has contributed to standards including TLS 1.3 at the IETF and ISO. Bryan Newbold is a protocol engineer at Bluesky Social PBC and works on the atproto effort within the IETF. Wendy Seltzer is a lawyer and technologist with experience across W3C, IETF, and ICANN. Filippo Valsorda is a cryptography engineer and operator of other append-only internet infrastructure; in the interest of disclosure, the announcement notes he holds a very small investment in Bluesky Social PBC.

Status and what comes next

So far the organization has adopted its statute, set up the digital tooling needed to function, and opened a bank account, with initial funding coming from what it characterizes as a modest bootstrap payment from Bluesky Social PBC.

The next milestone is preparing to take over the directory's assets and day-to-day operations. As part of that transition, the group plans to write the initial set of policies that will govern the ledger once the handover is complete. Looking further out, it intends to build tooling that gives users better visibility into and control over their network identities, broaden its funding beyond the bootstrap payment, and settle into a compact, dependable, sustainably run operation.

Why it matters

The PLC directory is the layer that maps AT Protocol identities to their keys and hosting arrangements, which makes it the component that determines whether accounts are genuinely portable and who ultimately controls them. Until now it has effectively been run by Bluesky Social PBC, leaving a single company as the operator of a foundational piece of the protocol stack.

Placing the ledger under a member-governed association with no shareholders is a structural fix: even if Bluesky the company changed course, the identity infrastructure would sit outside it. The board's composition, drawing on people from Let's Encrypt, the IETF, W3C, and ICANN, signals continuity with established internet governance practice rather than a clean break from it.

The caveat is timing. What exists today is the organization and its paperwork; the actual transfer of directory assets and operations has not happened yet, and the current setup continues until that handover is finished.