Provenance Record Terms

A Provenance Record is a document, produced by Sanchaari, that records a piece’s maker, origin, materials and technique, the review our team carried out, and every hand it has passed through. Its full public title is “Provenance Record — documented by Sanchaari”. Each unit of a piece has its own record and record identifier, in the form SAN-2026-IN-TG-000142.

Each record is backed by a per-record ledger. Every event — VERIFIED, MADE, LISTED, SOLD, TRANSFERRED and others — is hashed and chained to the one before it, so any later alteration is detectable.

We call this “tamper-evident”, not “tamper-proof”. The distinction is deliberate: the chain does not prevent someone editing a record, but it makes any edit visible when the chain is recomputed — which our verifier does on every view of a public record.

Batches of record entries are anchored to an internal Merkle root, an internal anchor batch #N, which is not yet published to a public blockchain. Public-chain anchoring is planned, and the record page always states the current status truthfully rather than implying more than is true today.

• It is not a guarantee of authenticity beyond our documented review, nor an appraisal or a promise of value;
• It does not transfer intellectual-property rights — designs, images and cultural knowledge stay with the maker and community;
• It does not, by itself, confer a Geographical Indication. A GI statement is shown at craft level, and a piece badge appears only when an authorised-user registration has been verified.

The owner of a record may transfer it to another registered person, which adds a TRANSFERRED entry to the chain. On public record pages, owners are shown pseudonymously — for example, “Private collector, London” — so provenance stays verifiable without exposing personal identity.

You never have to take our word for it. Any record can be looked up at /verify, where the chain is recomputed server-side and shown as “chain intact” or a clear failure state. Our process explainer walks through exactly how it works.