Platform — Evidence
Evidence that survives being checked.
Three properties, kept as three mechanisms, because one mechanism cannot deliver all three: nothing is missing, nothing was altered, and it existed by a certain time.
Three mechanisms, three questions
- A sequenced stream
- Each evidence stream carries a strictly increasing sequence. A removed record leaves a gap you can point at — unlike a hash chain, where a break is merely suspicious. This is the one that answers is anything missing, and it is the question a hash chain alone cannot answer.
- A Merkle seal
- Records are sealed into batches with a signed root. An inclusion proof discloses a single trajectory and nothing else — a regulator verifies it offline against the published key, with no access to your system and no sight of anybody else's records.
- An external anchor
- Signed roots are anchored outside this deployment, so integrity does not rest on trusting the operator — which is exactly the objection an adversarial auditor raises first.
Erasure without breaking the proof
Payloads can be erased on request. The structural record survives and every proof already issued keeps verifying, so a deletion obligation under GDPR Art. 17 does not cost you your audit trail — and you are not forced to choose between two legal duties that should never have been in tension.
Who held the key is on the artefact
Every signed document states its custody. Hold the key yourself and sealing stops when you withdraw access — a check you can run rather than a promise you have to take.
observed →Replay, not reconstruction
A recorded decision can be re-evaluated against the authority and policy that were in force at the time, rather than against today's. An answer that changes because the configuration changed is not an explanation of what happened.
observed →What was asserted stays asserted
Three states, never two: observed when we watched it,
asserted when we were told, not_recorded when
nobody said. A system that quietly promotes the second to the first is
manufacturing evidence.
The limit. None of this establishes that what an agent recorded was true of the world. It establishes that the record is complete, unaltered, and existed when it says it did. Those are different claims and conflating them would be the overclaim this product exists to argue against.