Fiduciaries & trustees
Discharge the duty to account without surrendering the confidentiality the settlor was promised. Prove diligence; keep custody.
The private-integrity substrate
A protocol for proving a trust is sound —
without disclosing what it holds.
TRVST.ESTATE is the generalisable, protocol-level abstraction for any family or charitable trust. Its orthography is its argument: just as V stands in for U, a zero-knowledge proof stands in for the fact it attests. The form is structurally self-similar to the cryptography — integrity, witnessed; substance, withheld.
trust state
VALID
The thesis
Confidence and confidentiality are not in tension.
Trusts are asked an impossible question. Beneficiaries, regulators, counterparties and successors all want assurance that a settlement is solvent, that distributions are lawful, that the deed is honoured. The conventional answer is disclosure — opening the books, surrendering privacy to earn belief.
A zero-knowledge proof refuses the trade. It lets a trustee demonstrate that a statement is true — the corpus exceeds its liabilities, a distribution falls within the deed, a beneficiary is entitled — whilst revealing nothing beyond the truth of the statement itself. The verifier learns that, never what.
How it works
Four movements, one guarantee.
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Commit
The trust’s private state — holdings, the deed, the schedule of beneficiaries — is committed to a cryptographic accumulator. The commitment is public; the witness it binds is not.
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Prove
A statement is expressed as a circuit — solvency, eligibility, compliance with the deed — and a proof is generated against the committed witness. The witness never leaves the fiduciary’s custody.
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Verify
Any party with the public commitment can check the proof in milliseconds. A valid proof is conclusive. An invalid one reveals only its own failure — never the data behind it.
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Attest
The verified proof becomes a durable, portable attestation — a record a regulator, bank or successor trustee can rely upon decades hence, with no standing access to the underlying estate.
What a proof can carry
Statements, not secrets.
Each row is a claim a trust can prove true without exposing the figures, names or instruments behind it.
| Statement | Discloses | Withholds |
|---|---|---|
| Corpus exceeds liabilities | Solvency | Balances, valuations |
| Distribution within deed | Compliance | Amount, recipient |
| Beneficiary is entitled | Eligibility | Identity, share |
| Settlor’s intent honoured | Fidelity | Terms of the deed |
| Asset is unencumbered | Good title | The asset itself |
Who it is for
The parties to a trust — each served, none over-exposed.
Families
Let successors and beneficiaries verify that the estate is sound and the deed observed — without circulating the inventory of what they will one day hold.
Charitable trusts
Demonstrate to donors and regulators that funds are applied to purpose, with proofs durable enough to outlast any single board.
Lawyers & advisers
Replace the standing data-room with portable attestations. Counsel can confirm a position is defensible without ever holding the privileged file.
One protocol, many estates
njenga.estate is one instance of this protocol — a single Declaration of Trust running on the substrate the estate itself defines. TRVST.ESTATE is the abstraction beneath it: the layer any trust can adopt to prove its own integrity on the same terms.