Blockchain timestamping for trade finance

The problem this solves

You need to establish that a document — a mandate, an allocation, a term sheet, a coded instrument — existed in a particular form at a particular moment.

Every ordinary way of doing that involves disclosure. A notary reads it. A deposit service stores it. A counterparty's copy is a copy in someone else's hands. For documents where the contents are the sensitive part, each of those creates a new problem while solving the first one.

A hash does not. The document is fingerprinted on your own machine and only the fingerprint travels. SHA-256 is a one-way function: there is no way back to the document from the hash, and the hash discloses nothing about what the document says. What gets recorded on a public ledger is a 64-character string that is meaningless to everyone except someone who already holds the file.

Where it gets used

• Allocations and mandates — fixing the exact terms as at a date, before circulation.
• Term sheets and side letters — a record of the version in play at a moment.
• Instruction sets — proving what was instructed, in what form, when.
• Correspondence packs — an integrity anchor on a bundle without lodging it anywhere.
• Pre-circulation records — what a document said before it went out for comment.

Built for batches

Documents in this segment arrive in sets rather than singly, and the workflow reflects that: certificates are bought as credits and spent when you choose, so timestamping six documents in a session is six credits rather than six separate purchases and six receipts.

Certificates do not expire once created. Credits stay spendable for twelve months from purchase. There is no subscription running between deals.

For a set of related documents, one option is to zip them and timestamp the archive, which produces one certificate covering the exact package. The other is one certificate per document, which lets you produce a single document later without revealing that the others exist. The second is usually the right choice in this context, and it is the more common pattern among the firms already doing this.

The objection: is this legally recognised?

Honestly answered: it is admissible evidence in a growing number of jurisdictions, and it is not a statutory instrument anywhere except in narrow, specific cases.

• France. On 20 March 2025 the Tribunal Judiciaire de Marseille accepted blockchain-anchored SHA-256 hashes as proof of anteriority in a design dispute — the first clear French judgment of its kind.
• EU. Under eIDAS Article 41(1) an electronic timestamp cannot be denied legal effect or admissibility merely because it is not qualified. It carries no presumption; weight is assessed on the merits.
• Italy. Article 8-ter of Law 12/2019 would give DLT storage the effect of an eIDAS electronic timestamp, but the technical standards it delegates to AgID were never issued, so it is generally treated as unimplemented.
• China. Recognised by the Supreme People's Court since the 2018 Internet Court Provisions, with a substantial body of practice since.

The full picture, with the limits stated plainly, is on is a blockchain timestamp valid in court.

What this does not do: it is not a qualified electronic signature, not a qualified timestamp, and it does not evidence the authority of whoever created the document. It complements the records you already keep rather than replacing any of them.

Verification a counterparty can perform

The certificate names the file's hash and links to one Ethereum transaction. Anyone can open that transaction on a public block explorer, read the payload as UTF-8, and compare. No account, no software, no cooperation from us — and, importantly, the check does not require the document itself unless the person checking already has it.

That property is the reason this works for confidential material: you can demonstrate the record exists, and separately demonstrate which document it covers, to different audiences.