The infrastructure of trust is changing.

Commerce begins with difference.

We exchange because no individual, organisation or country possesses every resource, skill or capability it needs. Through commerce, what one party can provide becomes valuable to another. Exchange allows knowledge to travel, organisations to specialise and societies to prosper.

But every exchange contains a moment of uncertainty.

A buyer must trust the quality of what is offered. A seller must trust that payment will arrive. Workers, producers, investors, regulators and communities must trust that commitments will be honoured and that the information on which decisions are made is worthy of belief.

Commerce therefore depends on more than transactions. It depends on trust.

Throughout history, societies have created ways for trust to travel: shared measures, stamped coins, signatures, contracts, institutions, professional standards and systems of law. These mechanisms allowed people to exchange beyond the boundaries of family, proximity and personal reputation.

Today, commerce is changing again.

Products, payments, claims and decisions move across borders and digital systems at unprecedented speed. Artificial intelligence is beginning to discover, compare, negotiate and act on behalf of people and organisations. Regulatory expectations are turning statements about origin, ownership, quality, impact and responsibility into obligations that must be supported by evidence.

We have digitised the movement of information. We have not yet made its meaning equally portable.

Evidence remains fragmented. The same facts are repeatedly requested, translated and verified. Important claims become separated from their sources. Organisations are asked to trust systems they cannot inspect, while those who create essential data, knowledge and value often have little control over how these are used.

The result is not simply inefficiency. It is a growing distance between what commerce says and what people can confidently know.

We believe that closing this distance is one of the defining economic and institutional challenges of the coming decade.

We call the shared response to this challenge Trusted Commerce.

Trusted Commerce is the capacity to know who or what is acting, what is being claimed, what evidence supports that claim, which rules apply and who is entitled to rely on it. It does not require blind confidence. It creates better grounds for judgement.

We hold the following principles

We commit to moving from principle to practice

As leaders from business, technology, finance, policy, science, standards, certification and civil society, we commit to:

• Connect important commercial claims to evidence and accountable entities.
• Support standards and architectures that enable interoperability and responsible reuse.
• Preserve meaningful human oversight as AI becomes part of commercial decision-making.
• Respect legitimate rights over data, knowledge, participation and value.
• Reduce duplicated verification without weakening assurance.
• Share practical lessons across industries and disciplines.
• Build systems that make responsible participation possible for smaller organisations, producers and communities—not only for those with the greatest resources.
• Treat trust as a continuous practice of governance, transparency and accountability.

We recognise that trust cannot be declared into existence. It must be earned through the systems we design, the commitments we honour and the power we are prepared to share.

We sign this declaration not to endorse a particular platform, standard or organisation, but to establish a common direction.

From Barcelona, we invite leaders across sectors, geographies and disciplines to join us in building a commercial system in which information can move without losing its meaning, innovation can scale without concentrating control, and progress can be recognised because it can be trusted.

The future of commerce will not be defined by speed alone.

It will be defined by whether people, organisations and intelligent systems have sufficient reason to act on what they receive—and whether the infrastructure beneath those decisions deserves their confidence.

Trust must become part of the architecture.