The Clavestra Laboratorium. Where the federation is built.
Clavestra Labs LLC is the Tbilisi-based engineering and research entity of the Clavestra group. It is also a guardian operator within the Iveria and Orbital federations — by deliberate design, the canary deployment environment for new federation code. Engineering, testing, deployment, and threshold-signing operations are co-located in a single Georgian engineering organisation.
Two complementary roles
Labs LLC has two distinct and operationally complementary roles in the Group’s activity.
The Guardian role. Labs LLC operates a guardian node within the Iveria federation, holding one share of the federation’s FROST threshold signing key. In this role, Labs LLC participates in every signing operation of the federation — every eCash issuance, every redemption, every reserve movement requires the agreement of a threshold of guardians, of which Labs LLC is one. Labs LLC also operates a parallel guardian node in the Clavestra Orbital federation in Switzerland, under an analogous arrangement.
The Guardian role is operational participation in the licensed activity of Clavestra Iveria Finance LLC (or, for the Orbital federation, of Clavestra Orbital GmbH), conducted strictly within the relevant licensed perimeter. Labs LLC does not conduct independent virtual asset service activity. It is not licensed as a VASP, and it does not act as a customer-facing counterparty. The Guardian role is documented in a Federation Participant Agreement filed with the National Bank of Georgia as a companion to the Iveria VASP application.
The R&D role. Labs LLC is the Group’s research and development entity. New federation modules, new cryptographic primitives, new payment-protocol integrations, new compliance tooling, and other engineering work are first developed and tested at Labs LLC before being promoted into Clavestra Iveria Finance’s production stack. The R&D function is conducted on dedicated test-network infrastructure (devnet, regtest, and provider sandboxes), separated at the network and operational layers from Labs LLC’s guardian-node infrastructure.
Canary deployment, by deliberate design
The two roles converge in a single principled engineering pattern.
Labs LLC’s guardian node is, by deliberate design, the canary deployment environment for new federation code. Software changes are first deployed to Labs LLC’s guardian node and observed under real federation operating conditions for a documented observation period. Only after canary observation completes successfully are changes rolled out to the remainder of the guardian set, under Iveria Finance’s documented release process.
This pattern — develop, canary-test, then promote across the federation — gives the federation a structural defence against silent regressions that survive pre-production testing. The cost is borne by a single guardian node operating under engineering discipline; the benefit accrues to the entire federation.
What we build
The Clavestra Labs engineering organisation works across the full Fedimint stack, with particular focus on:
Federation modules. Production Rust modules extending the upstream Fedimint protocol — including the Iveria mint module, the Liquid confidential-asset module, the Spark statechain module, the Taproot Assets stablecoin module, and the Conductor workflow-orchestration adapter.
Cryptographic primitives. FROST-secp256k1-tr threshold Schnorr signing with the ROAST aggregator; BLS12-381 threshold blind signatures for eCash; SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s as the hybrid post-quantum envelope on attestation artefacts.
Compliance integrations.
Agentic-payment surface integrations.
Bitcoin ecosystem integrations.
Labs LLC’s engineering output is open-sourced under the Group’s open-source policy where the relevant module is upstream-eligible, and held under the Group’s source-control governance otherwise. Several Labs-authored modules are upstream Fedimint contributions.
Our team
The Clavestra Labs engineering team operates from Tbilisi, drawing on Georgia’s substantial software, cryptography, and infrastructure-engineering talent pool. We hire deliberately and slowly; we onboard against the Group’s engineering and security standards before any production access is granted.
We are actively recruiting for senior Rust engineers, threshold-cryptography specialists, Lightning Network engineers, and compliance-tooling engineers based in Tbilisi.
Governance and oversight
Labs LLC’s activity is governed by a written Research and Development Policy approved by the boards of Clavestra Iveria Finance LLC and the Maltese parent. The Policy is structured around the two roles: the Guardian role, conducted strictly within Iveria Finance’s licensed perimeter under the Federation Participant Agreement; and the R&D role, conducted on dedicated test-network infrastructure outside the licensed perimeter under explicit prohibitions and quantitative limits. Any expansion of Labs LLC’s activity beyond the Policy requires prior approval of the Iveria board and prior notification to the National Bank of Georgia.
The Policy and the Federation Participant Agreement are filed with the National Bank as companion documents to the Iveria VASP application.
A note on the future of the Labs guardian seat
The applicant has noted in the Iveria White Paper that the Labs guardian seat in the federation may, in the medium term, be transferred to an external Georgian investor or strategic partner who wishes to participate as a chartered guardian. Any such transfer would diversify the federation’s guardian set, strengthen its anti-collusion property, be the subject of separate prior disclosure to the National Bank, and be conducted only with NBG approval where the licence terms so require. This is one of several mechanisms by which the federation’s guardian set will mature over time toward a fully arm’s-length institutional configuration.
Corporate structure
| Entity | Detail |
|---|---|
| Legal form | Limited Liability Company (Sps), Georgia |
| Registered office | Tbilisi, Georgia |
| Status | Operational, currently founder-held; share transfer to Clavestra Capital Holdings Ltd (Malta) to be completed before Iveria VASP application submission |
| Roles | (i) Guardian operator within the Iveria and Orbital federations; (ii) Group engineering and R&D entity |
| Activity scope | Operational participation in the licensed activity of sister entities, plus internal R&D; does not conduct independent VASP activity |
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Clavestra Labs LLC · Tbilisi, Georgia · Sister entity to Clavestra Iveria Finance LLC under Clavestra Capital Holdings Ltd (Malta, C113811)
Operating the keys to a better financial future