The Digital Provenance Record
A registration and its history, readable by anyone.
The DPR is an ERC-721 token on Arbitrum One. It carries an accredited laboratory’s signed statement and everything that happens to the record afterwards: later attestations, transfers, flags and links.
One word, defined
What “provenance” means here.
The record’s own registration history: which laboratory examined the coin, when, and everything that has happened to the record since.
It records the examination, not the coin’s genuineness, value or ownership.
Public and private
What anyone can read, and what stays private.
On the chain, readable by anyone
- A sequential record number, with no coin data in it
- A salted commitment to the surface profile
- Each attestation: laboratory, capture time, a hash of the examination record, withdrawn or not
- Documents attached by a laboratory, as signed hashes only
- The stolen flag and any clearance pending, with dates
- Links between records: replaces, replaced by, registered anew after a case
- The terminal that captured the registration, by address
- Whether the record is unclaimed, or the address of the account that holds it
Off the chain, never published
- Surface profiles
- Captured images
- Comparison scores
- Examination records and case files
- The text of documents and counter-notices
- Any name or identity document
A record over time
Every event stays in the history.
A schematic record. Each entry is appended; nothing is overwritten.
Registered
Laboratory A examined images captured at a whitelisted terminal and signed the first attestation.
Claimed
The claim key moved the record from the escrow to a passkey account.
Document attached
Document attached by the laboratory. Not verified by the register.
Transferred
The holder sent the record to another account.
Weekly anchor
The week’s events were summarised in a Merkle root and posted to Ethereum.
Attested again
Laboratory A compared a fresh capture and added a later attestation.
States
Where a record can be.
Unclaimed
Held by the escrow until someone claims it with the claim key. An unclaimed record does not expire.
Held
In the holder’s account, with no flag.
Stolen flag
The holder has raised a stolen flag: an unconfirmed public warning. Transfers still work.
Clearance pending
The holder has asked to clear the flag. It keeps showing until the waiting period ends.
Reissue pending
The issuing laboratory has announced a replacement record. It can be claimed after 30 days, unless the holder raises the stolen flag first.
Superseded
A replacement has been claimed. The old record stays on the chain, linked to its replacement.
The chain
Arbitrum One, with a weekly anchor on Ethereum.
A rollup, for cost
The contracts run on Arbitrum One, an Ethereum rollup. They use no chain-specific feature and could be deployed unchanged on another EVM chain.
No back door in the contracts
No party in the registry can alter or delete a recorded event through the contracts. The record contract has no administrator key, pause, burn or upgrade function.
Checkable every week
Once a week the registrar posts a Merkle root of the week’s events to Ethereum mainnet, chained to the week before. Anyone can recompute it, so a change to the history, even one made by the chain’s own governance, becomes visible.
Personal data
Addresses are personal data, and treated as such.
No name, image, profile or identity document is written to the chain. Account addresses, flags and hashes are, and they are treated as personal data. Only the current holder can ask for a record’s surface profile to be erased. The record then shows as attested but no longer checkable.
Become a launch partner.
Be among the first dealers and laboratories in the registry. Tell us about your business, and we will show you where registration fits.