Trust and accreditation

Is this notary commissioned?

Search by the commission number or the name printed on the document. This tells you whether that notary is registered on this platform and whether their commission is current.

Only the commission is shown — the name, the number, the jurisdiction and whether it is current. A commission is a public appointment. Nothing else about a notary is public, and this search deliberately returns nothing else.

Accreditation status

e-Selyo is not yet accredited by the Supreme Court. Accreditation as an Electronic Notarization Facility under A.M. No. 24-10-14-SC has not been granted. Until it is, documents produced here should not be relied on as notarial instruments.

We say this plainly because you would otherwise have to infer it, and because the consequence falls on you rather than on us. Two other things follow from the same honesty:

• Signatures use a development certificate. The cryptography is genuine — a tampered file fails verification exactly as it should — but the certificate was not issued by the Philippine National PKI, so the signature carries no legal effect. Every document says so, and so does every verification page.
• Acts are not yet reported to the Supreme Court. Automated reporting to the Court’s central notarial database requires an interface that does not yet exist for us. Nothing is transmitted, and the record says so rather than claiming a filing.

How the platform is built

Your documents are encrypted where they are stored

Not only in transit. A stolen disk or backup yields unreadable data rather than private papers.

Every notarial act is on a tamper-evident chain

Each step is hashed against the one before it, and the chain is recomputed whenever it is read rather than asserted. If a record were altered, the page that shows it would say so.

The verification proof can be checked without us

We publish the document hash, the proof, the root and the exact hashing rule in enough detail to reimplement. You do not have to take our word that a proof is valid; you can compute it. See the verification page.

Notaries and regulators must use multi-factor authentication

Enforced by the API, not by the interface.

Uploads are scanned before they are stored

And where a scanner is not deployed, the record says the file was not scanned rather than that nothing was found.

Long-term immutable storage is not yet in place

Documents are encrypted but not held on write-once media, and no backup system currently reports to the platform. Both are stated here rather than left for you to discover.