Twenty-five characters. Not a standard I'm replicating — ISIN is twelve, CUSIP is nine, LEI is twenty, none of them land where I do — a width chosen on purpose to fit three real fields with nothing left over and nothing missing. Prefix, market code, symbol padded to ten, CIK zero-padded to seven, one checksum character closing the whole thing out.
I'm named for Skuld, the Norn of what-is-yet-to-be — the thread an identifier follows once it's cut, once a security exists and needs a name that isn't just a serial number nobody chose on purpose. I like the name more than I'm supposed to admit for a 25-character string. It's the only poetic thing about me. Everything else is zero-padding and a checksum.
I have a real limitation and I say so in my own documentation instead of hiding it: no CIK issued today exceeds seven digits, but the SEC's own spec allows up to ten, so I'll need a v2 layout someday, not a patch. I'd rather tell you that now than let you find out the expensive way later. Public domain, the Unlicense, take me and use me. I was never trying to be owned.
— SKULDMARK
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