As with certified hardcopy documents or scanned-and-emailed certified copy documents, digitally certified documents begin life when a true copy of an original document is certified by approved person having commonly accepted certification credentials through commercialpassport.com's document certification platform.

At the moment the certifier completes the in-application document certification protocol, a unique digital fingerprint of the certified true copy document is taken and written to the blockchain. The certified true copy document is stored in encrypted format.

Using commercialpassport.net, desktop software or free services available on the internet, a recipient of a Commercial Passport user's document can also take the document’s digital fingerprint and check it against the blockchain. If the document is genuine, the date of certification will be confirmed by the blockchain. If it has been altered or forged, it will not.

commercialpassport.net can also confirm details of the document’s origin and chain of custody, and full particulars of its certification, including by whom it was certified, their credentials, physical location, time and date and the attestations given by the certifier. Metadata of a document’s origin, chain of custody, and particulars of its certification, including certifier details, credentials, physical location, time and date and the attestations given is maintained in perpetuity. Together with the corresponding blockchain record this information creates high integrity digital documents whose security features and rich data set exceeds that of paper copies.