Big part of it is entirely automated - setting your username to instead of the generic “@bsky.social” to use your own domain registrar will get you a check, as that proves that e.g. the Wendys account would actually be run by Wendys.com.

The other is bluesky manually giving certain (auto-verified?) accounts the ability to verify others. The example given is New York Times being able to verify all their own journalists.

But in both cases it’s different from the way Twitter used to do it (managing a manual database of all verified accounts) or does it now (lol pay $8 for a useless checkmark)