Chapter 2: The Companies

Five companies. One supply chain.

Company	What they do
LumenDrive Motors	Builds electric vehicles. Needs documents from everyone upstream.
FerroLink Industries	Makes battery housings. Buys materials, sells components. Sits in the middle.
VeloForge Materials	Produces alloys. Creates a material certificate for every batch.
QuantisSeal Labs	Independent testing lab. Issues neutral test reports.
NebulaFlow Cloudworks	Runs analytics platforms. Consumes product data for dashboards.

The TrustGrid Consortium operates the dataspace — defines the rules, credentials, and shared formats. Doesn't touch the data itself.

VeloForge Materials           QuantisSeal Labs
(material certificates)       (test reports)
        │                           │
        ▼                           ▼
FerroLink Industries ──────────────────────► LumenDrive Motors
(component documentation)                     (product passports)
        │                                          │
        └───────────┐                   ┌──────────┘
                    ▼                   ▼
              NebulaFlow Cloudworks
              (dashboards, analytics)

Participants and identity

In a dataspace, each company is a participant. Every participant gets a unique digital identity — a DID (Decentralized Identifier) — that other participants can verify. Think of it as a tamper-proof business card that proves who you are during every interaction.

The TrustGrid Consortium also issues each participant a verifiable credential — a digitally signed proof of membership. This credential is what policies check when deciding whether to grant access.

No shared user database. No central login system. Each company carries its own identity and proves it on demand.

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Next: How a Dataspace Works